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Title: The intelligent woman's guide to socialism and capitalism

Author: Bernard Shaw

Illustrator: Eric Kennington

Release date: April 14, 2025 [eBook #75859]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Brentano's Publishers, 1928

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE
INTELLIGENT WOMAN'S GUIDE TO SOCIALISM AND CAPITALISM
***

THE INTELLIGENT WOMAN’S GUIDE
TO SOCIALISM AND CAPITALISM

THE INTELLIGENT WOMAN’S GUIDE
TO SOCIALISM AND CAPITALISM
BY BERNARD SHAW

BRENTANO’S PUBLISHERS NEW
YORK
1928

COPYRIGHT, 1928, BY BRENTANO’S INC.

First printing, June, 1928

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO

MY SISTER-IN-LAW

MARY STEWART CHOLMONDELY

THE INTELLIGENT WOMAN TO WHOSE QUESTION
THIS BOOK IS THE BEST ANSWER I CAN MAKE

A FOREWORD FOR AMERICAN READERS
I have never been in America; therefore I am free from the delusion,
commonly entertained by the people who happen to have been born there,
that they know all about it, and that America is their country in the same
sense that Ireland is my country by birth, and England my country by
adoption and conquest. You, dear madam, are an American in the sense that
I am a European, except that the American States have a language in
common and are federated, and the European states are still on the tower of
Babel and are separated by tariff fortifications. When I hear people asking
why America does not join the League of Nations I have to point out to
them that America is a League of Nations, and sealed the covenant of her
solidity as such by her blood more than sixty years ago, whereas the affair
at Geneva is not a League of Nations at all, but only a so far unsuccessful
attempt to coax Europe to form one at the suggestion of a late American
President, with the result that the British Secretary of State for Foreign
Affairs makes occasional trips to Geneva, and, on returning, reassures the
British House of Commons by declaring that in spite of all Woodrow-
Wilsonic temptations to combine with other nations he remains an
Englishman first, last, and all the time; that the British Empire comes before
everything with him; and that it is on this understanding and this alone that
he consents to discuss with foreigners any little matters in which he can
oblige them without detriment to the said reserved interests. And this
attitude seems to us in England so natural, so obvious, so completely a
matter of course, that the newspapers discuss the details of Mr
Chamberlain’s report of his trip without a word about the patriotic exordium
which reduces England’s membership of the League to absurdity.
Now your disadvantage in belonging to a league of nations instead of to a
nation is that if you belong to New York or Massachusetts, and know
anything beyond the two mile radius of which you are the centre, you
probably know much more of England, France, and Italy than you do of
Texas or Arizona, though you are expected, as an American, to know all
about America. Yet I never met an American who knew anything about
America except the bits she had actually set eyes on or felt with her boots;
and even of that she could hardly see the wood for the trees. By comparison
I may be said to know almost all about America. I am far enough off to get

a good general view, and, never having assumed, as the natives do, that a
knowledge of America is my intuitional birthright, I have made enquiries,
read books, availed myself of the fact that I seem to be personally an
irresistible magnet for every wandering American, and even gathered
something from the recklessly confidential letters which every American
lady who has done anything unconventional feels obliged to write me as a
testimony to the ruinous efficacy of my books and plays. I could and should
have drawn all the instances in this book from American life were it not that
America is such a fool’s paradise that no American would have believed a
word of them, and I should have been held up, in exact proportion to my
accuracy and actuality, as a grossly ignorant and prejudiced Britisher,
defaming the happy West as ludicrously as the capitalist West defames
Russia. What I tell you of England you will believe. What I could tell you
of America might provoke you to call on me with a gun. Also it would lead
you to class me as a bitter enemy to America, whereas I assure you that
though I do not adore your country with the passion professed by English
visitors at public banquets when you have overwhelmed them with your
reckless hospitality, I give it a good deal of my best attention as a very
interesting if still very doubtful experiment in civilization.
But this much I will permit myself to say. Do not imagine that because at
this moment certain classes of American workmen are buying bathtubs and
Ford cars, and investing in building societies and the like the money that
they formerly spent in the saloons, that America is doing as well as can be
expected. If you were at this moment a miner’s wife in South Wales you
would be half starving; but the wife of a Colorado miner might think you
very lucky in having nothing more violent than half starving to endure. The
sweated women workers in the tenements of your big cities are told that in
America anyone can make a fortune who wants to. Here we spare them that
mockery, at least. You must take it from me, without driving me to
comparisons that between nations wound as personalities do between
individuals, that Capitalism is the same everywhere, and that if you look for
its evils at home you will miss nothing of them except perhaps some of the
socialistic defences which European States have been forced to set up
against their worst extremities.
In truth it is odd that this book should not have been written by an
American. Its thesis is the hopelessness of our attempts to build up a stable

civilization with units of unequal income; and it was in America that this
inequality first became monstrous not only in money but in its complete and
avowed dissociation from character, rank, and the public responsibility
traditionally attached to rank. On the eastern shores of the Atlantic the
money makers formed a middle class between the proletariat, or manual
working class, and the aristocracy, or governing class. Thus labor was
provided for; business was provided for; and government was provided for;
and it was possible to allow and even encourage the middle class to make
money without regard to public interests, as these were the business of the
aristocracy.
In America, however, the aristocracy was abolished; and the only
controlling and directing force left was business, with nothing to restrain it
in its pursuit of money except the business necessity for maintaining
property in land and capital and enforcing contracts, the business prudence
which perceives that it would be ruinous to kill outright the proletarian
goose that lays the golden eggs, and the fear of insurrection. There was no
longer a king and an aristocratic governing class to say to the tradesman
“Never mind the public interest: that is our business: yours is to get as rich
as you can, incidentally giving employment to the proletariat and increasing
our rent rolls”. All that remained was the tradition of unscrupulous
irresponsibility in business; and when the American millionaires first began
to astonish Europe with their wealth it was possible for the most notorious
of them, in the course of an enquiry into the proceedings of a Trust with
which he was connected, to reply to a criticism as to the effect of his
business policy on the public with a simple “Damn the public!”. Had he
been a middle class man in a country where there was a governing class
outside and above business, or a monarch with a council in the same
position, or even a State Church, his answer would have been entirely in
order apart from its verbal profanity. Duly bowdlerized it would have run “I
am a man of business, not a ruler and a lawgiver. The public interest is not
my job: I do not presume to meddle with it. My sole function is to make as
much money as I can”. Queen Elizabeth would have applauded such an
attitude as socially sound and highly becoming: nothing angered her more
than presumptuous attempts on the part of common persons to concern
themselves with her business of high politics.

When America got rid of monarchs and prelates and popes and British
cabinets and the like, and plunged into the grand republican experiment
which has become the rule instead of the exception in Europe since the war
swept all the emperors into the dustbin of history, she raised the middle
classes to the top of the social structure and thus delivered its civilization
into their hands without ennobling their traditions. Naturally they raced for
money, for more money, and still more money, and damned the public when
they were not doping it with advertisements which were by tacit agreement
exempted from the law against obtaining money by false pretences or
practising medicine without qualifications. It is true that they were forced to
govern as well by the impossibility of maintaining civilization without
government; but their government was limited and corrupted by their
principle of letting nothing stand in the way of their getting rich quickly.
And the ablest of them at that game (which has no attraction for the ability
that plays the higher games by which finally civilization must live) soon
became rich at a rate that made the European middle classes envious. In my
youth I heard little of great men arising in America—not that America did
not produce them, but that her money masters were more apt to persecute
than to advertize them—but I heard much of the great fortunes that were
being made there. Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, Carnegie, Rockefeller became
famous by bringing our civilization to the point to which Crassus and the
other millionaire contemporaries of Sulla and Julius Cæsar brought the
civilization of ancient republican Rome just before it set up Emperor
idolatry as a resting place on the road to ruin. Nowadays we have
multimillionaires everywhere; but they began in America; and that is why I
wonder this book of mine was not written in America by an American fifty
years ago. Henry George had a shot at it: indeed it was his oratory (to which
I was exposed for fortyfive minutes fortyfive years ago by pure chance) that
called my attention to it; but though George impressed his generation with
the outrageous misdistribution of income resulting from the apparently
innocent institution of private property in land, he left untouched the
positive problem of how else income was to be distributed, and what the
nation was to do with the rent of its land when it was nationalized, thus
leaving the question very much where it had been left a century earlier by
the controversy between Voltaire and the elder Mirabeau, except for the
stupendous series of new illustrations furnished by the growth of the great

cities of the United States. Still, America can claim that in this book I am
doing no more than finishing Henry George’s job.
Finally, I have been asked whether there are any intelligent women in
America. There must be; for politically the men there are such futile gossips
that the United States could not possibly carry on unless there were some
sort of practical intelligence back of them. But I will let you into a secret
which bears on this point. By this book I shall get at the American men
through the American women. In America as in England every male citizen
is supposed to understand politics and economics and finance and
diplomacy and all the rest of a democratic voter’s business on the strength
of a Fundamentalist education that excites the public scorn of the Sioux
chiefs who have seen their country taken from them by palefaced lunatics.
He is ashamed to expose the depths of his ignorance by asking elementary
questions; and I dare not insult him by volunteering the missing
information. But he has no objection to my talking to his wife as to one who
knows nothing of these matters: quite the contrary. And if he should chance
to overhear——!!!
G. B. S.
Conway, North Wales
17th April 1928

TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S

1
A CLOSED QUESTION OPENS

Socialism is an opinion as to how the income of the country should be
distributed. Its distribution is not a natural phenomenon: it is a matter for
arrangement, subject to change like any other arrangement. It has been
changed within living memory to an extent that would have seemed
incredible and scandalous to Queen Victoria, and is still being changed from
year to year. Therefore what we have to consider is not whether our
distribution shall be altered or not, but what further changes are desirable to
attain a prosperous stability. This is the closed question which re-opened in
the nineteenth century under the banner of Socialism; but it is one on which
everyone should try to form an original personal opinion without prompting
from Socialists. page 1

2
DIVIDING-UP

Dividing-up is neither a revolutionary novelty nor a Mosaic jubilee: it is a
necessary and unpostponable daily and hourly event of civilized life. As
wealth consists of food that becomes uneatable unless immediately
consumed, and of articles that wear out in use and perish if kept unused, it
must be divided-up and consumed at once. Saving is impossible: the things
will not keep. What is called saving is a bargain whereby a person in
possession of spare food allows another to consume it in return for an
undertaking to reverse the transaction at some future time. Between the two
nothing is saved, as one consumes what the other saves. A proposal that
everybody should save is pure nonsense. A nation which stopped working
would perish within a fortnight even if every member of it had “saved” a
million. 6

3
HOW MUCH FOR EACH?

This question does not settle itself. It has to be settled by law and enforced
by the police. If the shares are to be altered the law must be altered.
Examples of existing distribution. This has today become so repugnant to
the general moral conception of fairness and so incompatible with the
public health that there is a general revulsion of feeling against it. But the
revulsion can have no political effect until it becomes arithmetically
precise. It cannot be dealt with in terms of more or less: the question of how
much more or less must be exactly determined. And as wealth is measured
in money, distribution must be dealt with in terms of income. 7

4
NO WEALTH WITHOUT WORK

As a nation lives from hand to mouth there must be continuous productive
labor or there will be no food to distribute. But though everyone must eat,
everyone need not work, because under modern conditions each of us can
produce much more than enough to support one person. If everyone worked
everyone would have a good deal of leisure. But it is possible to arrange
that some people shall do all the work and have no leisure in order that
others should have all leisure and no work. These two extremes are
represented by complete Socialism and complete Slavery. Serfdom and
Feudalism and Capitalism are intermediate stages. The continual struggle of
persons and classes to alter the allotment of the labor task and the
distribution of wealth and leisure in their own favor is the key to the history
of revolutions. Enormous increase of the stakes in this game through
modern discoveries and inventions. 9

5
COMMUNISM

Communism must be considered without personal, political, or religious
prejudice as a plan of distribution like any other. It was the plan of the
apostles, and is universally practised in the family. It is indispensable in
modern cities. All services and commodities which are paid for by a
common fund and are at the disposal of everyone indiscriminately are
examples of communism in practice. Roads and bridges, armies and navies,
street lighting and paving, policemen, dustmen, and sanitary inspectors are
familiar and obvious instances. 11

6
LIMITS TO COMMUNISM

Communism is so satisfactory and unquestioned as far as it has gone that
those who are conscious of it may ask why everything should not be
communized. Reasons why this cannot be done. Communism is applicable
only to commodities and services which, being necessary or useful to
everybody, enjoy general moral approval. It can be extended to matters in
which the citizens are willing to give and take, as when the oarsman pays
rates for a cricket pitch in consideration of the cricketer paying rates for the
lake. But services as to which there is any serious difference of opinion,
such as church services, and commodities which some people believe to be
deleterious, such as alcoholic liquors, are excluded from the scope of
Communism. Surreptitious communism is necessary in the case of science,
and of learning generally, because the ordinary citizen does not understand
their importance sufficiently to be willing to pay for their endowment.
Governments are therefore obliged to endow them without consulting the
electors, who are left to believe that Greenwich Observatories, National
Galleries, British Museums and the like are provided gratuitously by
Nature. 14

7
SEVEN WAYS PROPOSED

Seven plans of distribution are at present advocated or practised. 1. To each
what he or she produces. 2. To each what he or she deserves. 3. To each
what he or she can get and hold. 4. To the common people enough to keep
them alive whilst they work all day, and the rest to the gentry. 5. Division of
society into classes, the distribution being equal or thereabouts within each
class, but unequal as between the classes. 6. Let us go on as we are. 7.
Socialism: an equal share to everybody. 19

8
TO EACH WHAT SHE PRODUCES

Apparent fairness of this plan. Two fatal objections to it: (a) it is impossible
to ascertain how much each person produces even when the product is a
material object; and (b) most people’s work consists, not in the production
of material objects, but in services. The clearest case of individual

production is that of a baby by its mother; but a baby is an expense, not a
source of income. In practice production and service are made
commensurate by paying the workers according to the time taken in
producing the commodity or rendering the service; but this does not carry
out the plan, as, when the time spent in qualifying the worker is taken into
account, the calculation becomes impossible. Illustrative cases. Case of the
married woman keeping a house and bringing up a family. The plan is
impossible, and, at bottom, nonsensical. 21

9
TO EACH WHAT SHE DESERVES

Tendency of those who are comfortably off to believe that this is what is
actually happening. Circumstances which support this view. Facts which
reduce it to absurdity. Proposals to adopt the principle and make it happen
in future. The first and final objection is that it cannot be done. Merit cannot
be measured in money. The truth of this can be ascertained at once by
taking any real case of two human beings, and attempting to fix the
proportion of their incomes according to their merits or faults. 26

10
TO EACH WHAT SHE CAN GRAB

This plan postulates equal grabbing power as between children, old people,
invalids, and ablebodied persons in the prime of life. That is, it presupposes
a state of things that does not exist. Otherwise it is simple amorality, which
even pirates find impossible if they are to hold together for any length of
time. It is, however, tolerated at present in trade. Lawless robbery and
violence are barred; but the tradesman may get as much and give as little
for it as he can; and the landlord may even use legalized violence to get the
utmost for the use of his land. The results of this limited toleration of grab
are so unsatisfactory that laws are continually being made to palliate them.
The plan, which is really no plan at all, must be dismissed as disastrous. 29

11
OLIGARCHY

The plan of making the few rich and the many poor has worked for a long
time and is still working. The advantages claimed for it. The rich class as a

preserve of culture. The incomes of the rich as a reservoir of money which
provides by its overflow the socially necessary fund of spare money called
capital. The privileges of the rich as a means of securing a governing class.
Efficacy of the plan when organized as the Feudal System. How it works in
villages and Highland clans. How it fails in cities. Modern urbanized
civilization has no use for it, all our governing work being done by paid
public servants. This leaves it with only one pretension: that of providing
capital by satiation and overflow. But the satiation is too costly even when
it is achieved. There is no guarantee that the rich will use any part of their
income as capital, or that when they do so they will invest it at home where
it is most needed. The accumulation of capital can be provided for in other
ways. The plan is breaking under the weight of its enormous abuses. 30

12
DISTRIBUTION BY CLASS

This happens to some extent at present. We are accustomed to think that
monarchs, as a class, should receive more than manual laborers; and as a
rule they do. But monarchs receive much less than Steel Kings and Pork
Barons; and unskilled laborers receive more than great mathematicians,
who, as such, receive nothing, and have to live by poorly paid
professorships. Clergymen get very little; and racing bookmakers get a
good deal. Nobody can determine what they ought to get; yet nobody can
defend what they do get on any rational ground. Those who think it a matter
of course that scavengers should receive less than bank managers cannot
say how much less, without which determination their opinion can have no
effect in a political settlement of distribution. The main argument for
enriching a class is that it enabled them to produce an idolatrous illusion of
superiority which gives them authority, which is necessary in organizing
society. But in modern society the persons in authority are often much
poorer in money than those whom they command. Illustrative cases. Real
authority has nothing to do with money. 35

13
LAISSER-FAIRE

Letting things alone is now called letting them slide: an admission that they
will not stay where they are. Change is a law of nature; and when

parliaments neglect it and Churches try to ignore it, the effect is not to avert
the changes but to make them hasty, ill-considered, and often catastrophic.
Unless laws and Articles of Religion change as often and as quickly as the
activities they control, a strain is set up which, if not relieved by the
prevalence of up-to-date ideas in government and the Churches, must wreck
civilization. 38

14
HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH?

The study of poverty. Poverty does not produce unhappiness: it produces
degradation: that is why it is dangerous to society. Its evils are infectious,
and cannot be avoided by any possible isolation of the rich. The attractions
of poverty. The folly of tolerating it as a punishment. We cannot afford to
have the poor always with us. The statute of Elizabeth. What constitutes
poverty. The sufferings of the rich. They are avoidable only by voluntarily
foregoing idleness and gluttony: that is, foregoing the only privileges that
riches confer. Poor and rich being equally objectionable, the question arises
how much is enough? What is enough for savage life. What was enough for
our grandmothers is not enough for ourselves. There is no limit to the
higher requirements of mankind. The question is therefore unanswerable as
applied to civilized life. The problem of distribution cannot be solved by
giving everyone enough: nobody can ever have enough of everything. But it
is possible to give everybody the same. 41

15
WHAT WE SHOULD BUY FIRST

The effect of distribution on industry. Political economy, or the art of
spending the national income to the greatest general advantage. Importance
of the order in which goods are produced. Those which are wanted most
should be produced first. Food, clothes, and houses should come before
scent and jewellery, babies’ needs before the needs of lapdogs. Nothing but
equality of purchasing power can preserve this vital order in the industries
which cater for purchasers. Inequality of income upsets it hopelessly: the
labor which should feed starving children is expended in the production of
trivial luxuries. This is excused on the ground that the purchasers give
employment. Absurdity of this plea. 49

16
EUGENICS

Effect of distribution on the quality of people as human beings. The
problem of breeding the nation. In breeding animals the problem is simple
though the art is uncertain and difficult, because the animal is bred for some
single specific purpose, such as the provision of food or for racing or
haulage. The stockbreeder knows exactly what sort of animal is wanted.
Nobody can say what sort of human being is wanted. It is not enough to say
that certain sorts are not wanted. The stockbreeders’ methods are therefore
not applicable: the keeper of a human stud farm, if such a thing were
established by a mad professor of eugenics, would not know what to aim at
or how to begin. We are therefore thrown back on natural sexual attraction
as our only guide. Sexual attraction in human beings is not promiscuous: it
is always specific: we choose our mates. But this choice is defeated by
inequality of income, which restricts our choice to members of our own
class: that is, persons with similar incomes or no incomes. Resultant
prevalence of bad breeding and domestic unhappiness. The most vital
condition of good distribution is that it shall widen the field of sexual
selection to the extent of making the nation completely intermarriageable.
Only equality of income can do this. 53

17
THE COURTS OF LAW

Though Justice should not be a respecter of persons, the courts must respect
persons if they have different incomes. Trial by jury is trial by a jury of
peers, not only the peers of the accused but of the accusers and of the whole
body of citizens. This is in practice impossible in a civilized society of
persons with unequal incomes, as the person with a large income has not the
same interests and privileges as the person with a small one. As access to
the courts of justice costs money the poor are cut off from them by their
poverty or terrorized by the threats of the rich to drag them there. The
abuses of divorce and alimony. Sale of husbands and wives. Blackmail.
Abuses in the criminal courts. Corruption of the law itself at its source in
Parliament by the rich majority there. Severity of the laws against theft
practised by the poor on the rich. Complete exemption of the crime of rich
idling, which is the form of theft practised by the rich on the poor.

Inequality of income thus effects a divorce of law from justice, leading to
an anarchic disrespect for the law and a general suspicion of the good faith
of lawyers. 56

18
THE IDLE RICH

Idleness does not mean inactivity. Over-exertion and “rest cures” of the
rich. Their dangerous and exhausting sports. The flapper dances harder than
the postman walks. Spartan training of the old rich. It is soon acquired by
the new rich, who begin by trying to loaf. The diplomatic and military
services as preserves for the energetic rich. The unpaid magistry. Estate
management. Parliament. Effect of contraception and hotel life in service
flats in extending the possibilities of complete uselessness and self-
indulgence. Exceptional cases of eminent workers with unearned incomes.
Florence Nightingale and John Ruskin. Not inactivity but consuming
without producing is what is meant by economic idleness. Ironic vanity of
the attempt to secure happiness and freedom by having plenty of money and
nothing to do. 59

19
CHURCH, SCHOOL, AND PRESS

The Church school in the village. Deference to the rich taught as loyalty
and religion. Persecution of schoolmasters for teaching equalitarian
morality. Corruption of the universities and of the newspapers. Difficulty of
separating the mass of falsehood inculcated and advertized in the interest of
the rich from the genuine learning and information in which rich and poor
have a common interest. 63

20
WHY WE PUT UP WITH IT

We endure misdistribution and even support it because it is associated with
many petty personal benefits and amusements which come to us by way of
charity and pageantry, and with the chance of winning the Calcutta Sweep
or inheriting a fortune from an unknown relative. These pageants and prizes
are apprehensible by the narrowest minds in the most ignorant classes,
whereas the evils of the system are great national evils, apprehensible only

by trained minds capable of public affairs. Without such training the natural
supply of broad minds is wasted. Poverty, by effecting this waste on an
appalling scale, produces an artificial dearth of statesmanlike brains,
compelling us to fill up first-rate public posts with second-rate and often
sixth-rate functionaries. We tolerate the evils of inequality of income
literally through want of thought. 65

21
POSITIVE REASONS FOR EQUALITY

Equal division has been tested by long experience. Practically all the work
of the world has been done and is being done by bodies of persons
receiving equal incomes. The inequality that exists is between classes and
not between individuals. This arrangement is quite stable: there is no
tendency for the equality to be upset by differences of individual character.
Here and there abnormal individuals make their way into a better paid class
or are thrown out into an unpaid vagrancy; but the rule is that each class
either keeps its economic level or rises and falls as a class, its internal
equality being maintained at every level. As people are put so they will stay.
Equality of income, far from being a novelty, is an established practice, and
the only possible one as between working individuals in organized industry.
The problem is therefore not one of its introduction, but of its extension
from the classes to the whole community. 68

22
MERIT AND MONEY

Equality of income has the advantage of securing promotion by merit.
When there is inequality of income all merits are overshadowed by the
merit of having a large income, which is not a merit at all. Huge incomes
are inherited by nincompoops or made by cunning traders in vice or
credulity; whilst persons of genuine merit are belittled by the contrast
between their pence and the pounds of fools and profiteers. The person with
a thousand a year inevitably takes precedence of the person with a hundred
in popular consideration, no matter how completely this may reverse their
order of merit. Between persons of equal income there can be no eminence
except that of personal merit. Hence the naturally eminent are the chief
preachers of equality, and are always bitterly opposed by the naturally

ordinary or inferior people who have the larger shares of the national
income. 70

23
INCENTIVE

It is urged against equality that unless a person can earn more than another
by working harder she will not work harder or longer. The reply is that it is
neither fair nor desirable that she should work harder or longer. In factory
and machine industry extra exertion is not possible: collective work goes on
at the engine’s speed and stops when the engine stops. The incentive of
extra pay does not appeal to the slacker, whose object is to avoid work at
any cost. The cure for that is direct compulsion. What is needed is an
incentive to the community as a whole to choose a high standard of living
rather than a lazy and degraded one, all standards being possible. Inequality
of income is not merely useless for this purpose, but defeats it. The problem
of the Dirty Work. On examination we discover that as it is done mostly by
the worst paid people it is not provided for at present by the incentive of
extra pay. We discover also that some of the very dirtiest work is done by
professional persons of gentle nurture without exceptional incomes. The
objection to dirty work is really an objection to work that carries a stigma of
social inferiority. The really effective incentive to work is our needs, which
are equal, and include leisure. 72

24
THE TYRANNY OF NATURE

The race must perish through famine if it stops working. Nobody calls this
natural obligation to work slavery, the essence of which is being compelled
to carry another ablebodied person’s burden of work as well as one’s own.
Pleasurable toil and toilsome pleasure. General ignorance of the art of
enjoying life. The imposture of our commercially provided amusements.
Working for fun is more recreative than wasting time and money.
Monotonous work makes even a painful change welcome: hence our
hideous excursion train holidays. Labor is doing what we must; leisure is
doing what we like; rest, or doing nothing, is a necessity imposed by work,
and is not leisure. Work can be so absorbing that it can become a craze like
the craze for drink. Herbert Spencer’s warning. 80

25
THE POPULATION QUESTION

To every proposal for a general increase of incomes it is objected that its
benefits will be swallowed up by married people having too many children.
It is also alleged that existing poverty is due to the world being too small to
produce food enough for all the people in it. The real cause is that there are
too many people living as parasites on their fellows instead of by
production. Illustrations from domestic service. Increase of population,
leading to division of labor, enriches the community instead of
impoverishing it. Limits to this law of increasing return. Possibilities of
human multiplication. The question is not one of food alone but of space.
The speed at which population increases has to be considered as well as the
ultimate desirability of the increase. Too many unproductive children may
starve a family though the country as a whole may have unlimited
employment for adults; therefore the cost of bearing and bringing up
children should be borne by the State. Checks to population. War,
pestilence, and poverty. Contraception, or artificial birth control. Exposure
of female infants. Mahomet’s view of it. Capitalism, by producing
parasitism on an enormous scale has produced premature overpopulation,
kept under by excessive infant mortality and the diseases of poverty and
luxury. Equality of income can get rid of this, and place population on its
natural basis. University teaching on the subject, which alleges that a
natural law of diminishing return is now in operation, is merely one of the
corruptions of political science by Capitalism. Possibility of local
overpopulation in an underpopulated world. Examples. 83

26
THE DIAGNOSTIC OF SOCIALISM

Socialism entirely independent of Socialists or their writings and utterances.
“Joining the Socialists”. Many professed Socialists are so because they
believe in a delusion called Equality of Opportunity, and would recant if
they discovered that Socialism means unconditional equality of income for
everyone without regard to character, talent, age, or sex. This is the true
diagnostic of Socialism, and the touchstone by which Socialists may be
distinguished from Philanthropists, Liberals, Radicals, Anarchists,
Nationalists, Syndicalists, and malcontents of all sorts. Henri Quatre’s

prescription of “a chicken in the pot for everybody” is amiable and kindly;
but it is not Socialism. 92

27
PERSONAL RIGHTEOUSNESS

Amateur reformers who believe that the world can be made good by
individual effort. Ordering the servants to dine with you. Inequality is not
the fault of the rich. Poverty is not the fault of the poor. Socialism has
nothing to do with almsgiving or personal generosity or kindness to the
poor. Socialism abhors poverty and the poor, and has no more to do with
relieving them than with relieving riches and the rich: it means to abolish
both ruthlessly. Questionableness of the virtues that feed on suffering. Doles
and almsgiving are necessary at present as an insurance against rebellion;
but they are dangerous social evils. Panem et circenses. Government cannot
suppress this abuse until it possesses the powers of employment now in
private hands. It must become the national landlord, employer, and
financier. It is not enough to know the object of Socialism and to be
convinced of its possibility. Commandments are no use without laws; and
Socialism is from beginning to end a matter of law and not of personal
righteousness. 95

28
CAPITALISM

Capitalism might more properly be called Proletarianism. Its abolition does
not involve the destruction of capital. The social theory of Capitalism. The
Manchester School. Property, private or real, and personal. Powers of
landlords. Distinction between private property and personal possession.
Private property an integral part of Capitalism. Incompatible with
Socialism. Conservative and Labor parties are at bottom parties for the
maintenance and abolition respectively of private property. Literary
property. 100

29
YOUR SHOPPING

Incidence of unequal distribution in the shop. Nothing obtainable at cost
price: every price is loaded with a tribute to private property. Averaging the

cost of production of the entire national supply gives the real cost price.
This is the price aimed at by Socialism. Under Capitalism the cost of
production of that part of the supply which is produced under the most
unfavorable circumstances fixes the price of the entire supply. The coal
supply. By nationalizing the coal industry the public can be supplied at the
averaged cost price per ton. Examples from our numerous existing
nationalizations. 105

30
YOUR TAXES

Grumbling about the taxes. Government gives value at the cost price to
itself; but this includes loaded prices paid by it to profiteers and landlords
for materials, services, and sites. Taxation of unearned income as a method
of avoiding these overcharges and even of providing the service at the cost
of the landlords and capitalists. Income tax, supertax, and death duties. The
National Debt. Taxation as a means of redistributing income. The War
Loan. The failure of private enterprise and the success of National Factories
during the war. 111

31
YOUR RATES

The method of rating makes every rate a roughly graduated income tax.
How the ratepayers are exploited. Illustrations: the charwoman, the Dock
Companies, and the Drink Trade. The Poor Law, Municipal trading, and the
Post Office as instruments of exploitation. 117

32
YOUR RENT

Rent is the most simple and direct form of exploitation. Difference between
house rent and cost of house. Ground rents in great cities. Powers of life
and death and of exile enjoyed by landlords. Sheep runs. Deer forests. The
value of all improvements is finally appropriated by the landlords. The
Single Tax. 122

33
WHAT CAPITAL IS

Definition of Capital. Spare money. Pathological character of Capitalist
civilization. Wickedness of preaching thrift to the poor. Capital, being
perishable, must be consumed promptly, disappearing in the process.
Danger of Hoarding. Instability of money values. Inflation. Debasing the
currency. Constant expenditure necessary. 127

34
INVESTMENT AND ENTERPRISE

The nature of investment. Not deferred consumption, but transferred and
postponed claim to be fed. Exploitation of the hungry by the intelligent.
Estate Development. Illustrative case of a country house and park
developed into a suburb. Proprietors without the necessary business ability
can hire it. Big business. The magic of capital. 131

35
LIMITATIONS OF CAPITALISM

Capital is indispensable to civilization; but its private appropriation is
finally a hindrance to it, and perverts the order of its application. Examples:
Distilleries versus lighthouses and harbors. Error of assuming that low
prices with large sales are more profitable than high prices with restricted
sales. Cases in point: telegraph and telephone services. Snowball letters.
Commercial profit is no index to social utility. 113

36
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

Capital, though beginning at the wrong end, is driven finally to the right
end. Invention and inventors. Labor-saving machinery. Power: water, steam,
and electric. Handmade and machine-made goods. Cheapness. The
industrial revolution, though it has wrought evil, is not evil in itself.
Retrogression is neither possible nor desirable. 137

37
SENDING CAPITAL OUT OF THE COUNTRY

Capital has no country, being at home everywhere. Restrictions on trade at
home, however beneficial, drive it abroad. Example: the trade in

intoxicating drink may be driven to Africa by high excise in England and
prohibition in America. Superior attraction of the slave trade. Suppression
of slave trading followed by indirect enforcement of compulsory labor by
means of hut taxes and the like. Development of other countries by English
capital accompanied by neglect of home industrial resources and of the
improvement of our towns. The foreign competition of which capitalists
complain is often created by their own exports of capital. 140

38
DOLES, DEPOPULATION, AND PARASITIC PARADISES

Investments of our capital abroad bring in gratuitous imports as interest.
The expenditure of this tribute gives employment. It is, however, parasitic
employment. The employees may be more pampered than productive
employees; and this, combined with the disappearance of manufacturing
towns and their replacement by attractive residential resorts, may produce
an air of increased prosperity and refinement in all classes; but it does not
provide suitable employment for the rougher workers discharged by the
discarded factories, who have to be got rid of by Assisted Emigration or
kept quiet by doles. If the process were unchecked England would become
a country of luxurious hotels and pleasure cities inhabited by wealthy hotel
guests and hotel servants with their retinue of importers and distributors, all
completely dependent on foreign tribute from countries which might at any
moment tax the incomes of absentee capitalists to extinction, and leave us
to starve. 145

39
FOREIGN TRADE AND THE FLAG

Only freshly saved capital can be exported. The capital consumed in the
establishment of mines, railways, and fixed industrial plant cannot be
shipped abroad. When the home market supplied by them dries up through
change or exhaustion of demand, the plant must either close down or seek
markets abroad. This is the beginning of foreign trade. Trade with civilized
nations is hampered by foreign protective duties or by the competition of
the manufacturers on the spot. Undeveloped countries which have no tariffs
and no manufactures are the most lucrative markets; but the ships’ crews
and cargoes must be defended against massacre and plunder by the natives.

This leads to the establishment of trading stations where British law is
enforced. The annexation of the station makes it an outpost of the British
Empire; and its boundary becomes a frontier. The policing of the frontier
soon necessitates the inclusion of the lawless district beyond the frontier;
and thus the empire grows without premeditation until its centre shifts to
the other side of the earth. 150

40
EMPIRES IN COLLISION

Collision of the expanding empires. Fashoda incidents. The German
demand for a place in the sun. The war of 1914-18. Expansion of
professional soldiering into conscription. The strains set up automatically
by the pressure of capitalistic commerce, and not the depravity of human
nature, are the causes of modern wars. Its horrors are therefore not a ground
for despair of political mankind. We celebrate the end of the Great War, not
the beginning of it. The real origin of the mischief. 152

41
THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE

Foreign trade not objectionable as such. Need for international institutions
as well as national ones. Supernational federations and Commonwealths
highly desirable: the fewer frontiers the better. Combination obstructed by
the hard fact that Capitalism creates universal rivalry, seeking, not to
combine for the common benefit, but to appropriate for the individual
benefit. Its resistance to national self-determination and independence arises
from its reluctance to relinquish its booty. Our colonies and our conquests.
Being by its nature insatiable Capital cannot stop fighting until it is killed.
Hence the comparison of our civilization to the magician’s apprentice who
set demons to work for him, but could not stop them when his life depended
on his getting rid of them. 157

42
HOW WEALTH ACCUMULATES AND MEN DECAY

Personal helplessness produced by division of labor. Illustration from pin
manufacture. Optimism of Adam Smith. The various qualifications and
accomplishments of the complete individual craftsman. The relative

incompetence and ignorance of the employed through division of labor.
Total technical ignorance of the machine minder. Misgivings of Oliver
Goldsmith, Ruskin, and Morris. The remedy not retrogression but equal
distribution of the leisure made possible by mass production. Ignorance and
helplessness as great in the modern household as in the factory. 161

43
DISABLEMENT ABOVE AND BELOW

As the disablement does not extend to the workers’ leisure it is important
that they should have plenty of it. Unfortunately it is as ill distributed as
income, the tendency of Capitalism being to separate the population into a
class doing all the work with no leisure and a class doing no work and
having all the leisure. The feudal system avoided this by placing all the
public services on the shoulders of the landlords. The transfer of these
services to a bureaucracy leaves the proprietary or capitalist class even
more completely disabled than the proletariat for the conduct of industry.
This disablement increases with the development of capitalist civilization,
and maybe regarded as a function of it. 164

44
THE MIDDLE STATION IN LIFE

The industrial disablement of the proletariat and the proprietariat
necessitates the intervention of a middle class to direct industrial operations
and transact the business they involve. How this necessity was met.
Primogeniture. The propertyless younger sons. The professions. The men of
business. The clerks. The breakdown of the monopoly of education by the
middle class now opens it to capable proletarians as well as to younger sons
and their descendants. The resultant hardening of the lot of the younger
sons. The propertyless daughters. Opening of the professions to them.
Woman’s natural monopoly of housekeeping. It creates not only a Woman
Question but a Man Question. 168

45
DECLINE OF THE EMPLOYER

The employer was master of the situation in the days of small firms with
modest capitals. Modern big business has outgrown their resources. Joint

stock companies have succeeded to firms, and Trusts to joint stock
companies. Multiple shops are conquering the retail trade. Enormous
capitals now required. Resultant rise of the financier, whose special
function it is to procure such capitals and promote companies to exploit
them. Thus the owner-employer becomes the employed employer, and, as
an employee, falls into the proletariat. His son cannot succeed him, as he
could when the employer was also the owner. This disappearance of the old
nepotism in business is a public advantage, but abolishes heredity in the
business class. “The Middle Station in Life” so highly praised by Defoe is
now the least eligible in the community. 177

46
THE PROLETARIAT

The slogan of Karl Marx. The reduction of the middle class employer to a
proletarian employee produces Socialism. The Fabian Society. Its success
as a middle class society. Failure of its Socialist rivals as working class
societies. Working class organization against Capitalism. Trade Unionism,
or the Capitalism of the working class proletariat. 183

47
THE LABOR MARKET AND THE FACTORY ACTS

Employers and employed alike buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest
markets open to them. Resultant opposition of interest between the buyer of
labor and the seller of it. The Class War. Its atrocities. Slaves better cared
for than “free” vendors of their own labor. Exposures by Karl Marx.
Restraints imposed by factory legislation. Opposition by employers. Their
apprehension not justified by the effect of the Acts. Opposition of the
proletariat. Its parental interest in child labor. The parish apprentices. Prices
in the labor market. The value of labor falls to zero. The theory of
Capitalism. The Manchester school. Failure of the Capitalist system to
make good its guarantees. The reserve army of unemployed. The Statute of
Elizabeth. The workhouse. Child sweating practically compulsory on
parents. 187

48
WOMEN IN THE LABOR MARKET

Men’s wages are family wages, women’s wages individual wages. The
effect is to make the proletarian married woman the slave of a slave, and to
establish conventions that the man is the breadwinner; that the woman’s
work in the home being apparently gratuitous, is not work at all; and that
women, when they are directly paid for their work, should be paid less than
men. Protection of women in the propertied class by marriage settlements,
and in the middle class by the Married Women’s Property Acts. The
sweating of daughters living partly on their father’s wages enables one trade
to sweat another, and produces a class of women who work for less than
subsistence wages without starving. Their competition brings down the
wages of all women of their class below subsistence level, with the result
that women who have neither husband nor father to make up the shortage
must make it up by prostitution or suffer the extremity of excessive toil and
insufficient food. The wages of sin often much higher than the wages of
virtue. The affiliation laws and the advantages of having illegitimate
children. The Song of the Shirt and the Mind The Paint Girl. Male
prostitution: dancing partners, barristers, clerks, journalists, parliamentary
careerists, doctors, etc. Difference in quality between the physical
prostitution forced on the woman and the mental prostitution forced on the
man. 196

49
TRADE UNION CAPITALISM

Resistance of the proletariat to the capitalists. Combination the first
condition of effective resistance. Combination difficult or impossible as
between segregated workers (domestic servants and agricultural laborers)
and workers differing greatly in class (actors). Easy as between factory
operatives, miners, and railway workers. The weapon of the combinations is
the strike: that of the employers’ counter-combinations the lock-out. The
warfare at its worst. Rattening. The Manchester and Sheffield outrages.
“Ca’ canny”, and “restricting output”. The cost of this warfare to the
community. Capitalism cannot check it because Trade Unionism is only the
application of the Capitalist principle to labor as well as to land and capital.
Resistance of the employers. Attempt to suppress the Unions as criminal
conspiracies. Refusal to employ unionists. Combinations of employers into
employers’ federations. Victimization. The disablement of labor by
machinery obliges the Unions to insist on piecework wages instead of time

wages. Machine minding by girls’ and women’s Unions. Failure of the
proletariat to secure any considerable share of the increase in the national
output produced by machinery. 204

50
DIVIDE AND GOVERN

The impermanence of the concessions wrested by the Unions from the
employers by strikes makes it necessary for the proletariat to have them
established as laws (Factory Acts, etc.): hence the appearance in Parliament
of Labor members, and finally of an Independent Labor Party. The Factory
Acts, beginning with the protection of children and women, acted as a
protection for the men also. In factories, when the women and children stop
the engine stops; and when the engine stops the men must stop. How these
concessions were wrung from Parliament through a split in the Capitalist
ranks whilst Labor was in a negligible minority there. The manufacturers in
1832 break the monopoly of Parliament by the landlords. The Factory Acts
as the revenge of the landlords. These two Capitalist parties compete for
popular support by bribing the proletariat with votes. Final complete
enfranchisement of the proletariat. Meanwhile Socialism, having sprung
into existence under middle class leadership, had undertaken the political
education of the proletariat. Romantic illusions of the middle class about
the industrial proletariat. Failure of the Socialist societies to supplant Trade
Unionism. Success of the Fabian Society as a middle class body permeating
all existing political organizations. Establishment of the Labor Party in
Parliament as a political federation of Socialist societies and Trade Unions.
Its history up to 1927. On the Trade Union side the tendency is not to
Socialism but to Capitalism controlled by Labor, with the middle and
propertied classes reduced to subjection in the interest of the proletariat. As
the proletariat has the advantage of numbers this arrangement would profit
the majority; but it would be so unpalatable to the propertied and learned
classes that they may conceivably be driven to clamor for Socialism to save
them from it. 213

51
DOMESTIC CAPITAL

The conversion of capital into machines, vehicles, and other aids to labor.
The delusion that this operation can be reversed, and the machines and
vehicles converted into spare ready money. Why this impossible operation
seems to practical business men to be not only possible but an everyday
occurrence. The real nature of the transactions which delude them. As these
transactions can be effected only by a few people at a time, an attempt to
force them on the whole Capitalist class simultaneously by a tax on capital
must fail. The income of the capitalist is real: her capital, once invested, is
imaginary, as it has been consumed in the act of converting it into aids to
labor. Death Duties, nominally taxes on capital, are not really so, and are as
objectionable in practice as they are unsound in theory. Insanity of
estimates of the wealth of the country in terms of capital values. 225

52
THE MONEY MARKET

The Money Market is not a market for the sale and purchase of spare
money, but for its hire. Difference between hiring and borrowing. Payment
for the hire of spare money is called in business interest, and in old-
fashioned economic treatises “the reward of abstinence”. In the case of
spare cash in the money market the obligation of the owner to the hirer is as
great as that of the hirer to the owner, since capital not hired perishes by
natural decay. Negative interest. The real business of the money market is to
sell incomes for lump sums of spare ready money. Enormous rates of
interest paid by the poor. The Bank Rate. Lending to companies. Limited
liability. Varieties of shares and debentures. Jobbers and brokers. The
connection of Stock Exchange transactions with industry is mostly only
nominal. Warnings. Bogus companies. Genuine companies which are
smoked out. “Coming in on the third reconstruction.” Perils of enterprise, of
public spirit, of conscience, and of imaginative foresight. 231

53
SPECULATION

Risk of becoming a gambler’s wife. Selling and buying imaginary shares
for phantom prices. How this is possible. Settling day on the Stock
Exchange. Fluctuations. Bulls, bears, and stags. Contango and
Backwardation. Cornering the bears. The losses risked are only net, not

gross. Cover. Bucket shops. Unreality of the transactions. An extraordinary
daily waste of human energy, audacity, and cunning. 239

54
BANKING

Spare money for business purposes is mostly hired from bankers.
Overdrafts. Discounted bills of exchange. The Bank Rate. How the bankers
get the spare money they deal in. Customers must not draw their balances
simultaneously. The word credit. Credit is not capital: it is a purely abstract
opinion formed by a bank manager as to the ability of a customer to repay
an advance of goods. Credit, like invested capital, is a phantom category. Its
confusion with real capital is a dangerous delusion of the practical business
man. “Bubbles” founded on this delusion. The Bank Rate depends on the
supply and demand of spare subsistence available. Effective demand.
Proposals to tax invested capital and credit. A hypothetical example. 243

55
MONEY

Money as a tool for buying and selling. As a measure of value. As material
available for other purposes and therefore valuable apart from its use as
money. The latter a guarantee against the dishonesty of governments.
Debasing the currency. Paper money. Inflation. Post-war examples.
Deflation. Stability the main desideratum. How to maintain this.
Fluctuations in the value of money indicated by a general rise or fall of
prices. Cheques and clearing houses as economisers of currency.
Communism dispenses with pocket money. The Bank of England as the
bankers’ bank. An intrinsically valuable coinage the safest and most stable.
251

56
NATIONALIZATION OF BANKING

The nationalization of minting is necessary because only a Government can
establish a legal tender currency. Cheques and the like, circulating as
private currency, are not legal tender money but only private and insecure
title deeds to such money; but legal tender money is a Government title
deed to goods. Cheques and bills of exchange are senseless unless

expressed in terms of money. The nationalization of the manufacture of
money is a matter of course. The case for nationalization of banking, though
less obvious, is equally strong. Profiteering in spare money. Municipal
banks. There is no mystery about banking; and those who now conduct it
are as available for public as for private employment. 264

57
COMPENSATION FOR NATIONALIZATION

The fate of the shareholder when the banks are nationalized. Purchase of
their shares no expense to the nation if the cost be levied on the whole body
of capitalists. The apparent compensation is really distributed confiscation.
The process a well established and familiar one. Candidates who advocate
expropriation without compensation do not know their business and should
not be voted for. Alternative of Government entering competitively into
industries and beating private enterprises out of them. Objections.
Wastefulness of competition. A competing State enterprise would have to
allow competition with itself, which is often inadmissible in the case of
ubiquitous services. The private competitor is indifferent to the ruin of a
defeated rival; but the State must avoid this. 268

58
PRELIMINARIES TO NATIONALIZATION

Nationalization, though theoretically sound, and its expense a bogey, is
practically an arduous undertaking, involving the organization of a central
department with local services throughout the country. It is possible only in
stable and highly organized States. Revolutions and proclamations cannot
by themselves nationalize anything. Governments may plunder and wreck
State industries to avoid imposing unpopular direct taxes. 274

59
CONFISCATION WITHOUT COMPENSATION

There is always a clamor by indignant idealists for direct retributive
confiscation without compensation. Its possibilities. Taxation of capital as a
means of forcing defaulters to surrender their title deeds and share
certificates to the Government is plausible and not physically impossible.
276

60
REVOLT OF THE PARASITIC PROLETARIAT

The expropriation of the rich is objected to on the ground that the rich give
employment. The sense in which this is true. The parasitic proletariat. Bond
Street and Bournemouth. All transfers of purchasing power from the rich to
the Government depress the parasitic trades and their employees. A sudden
wholesale transfer would produce an epidemic of bankruptcy and
unemployment. Governments must immediately expend the incomes they
confiscate. 277

61
SAFETY VALVES

Doles. Throwing the confiscated money into nationalized banks. Raising
wages in confiscated industries. War. Would these act quickly enough? An
uninterrupted circulation of money is as necessary to a nation as an
uninterrupted circulation of blood to an animal. Any general and
simultaneous confiscation of income would produce congestion in London.
Grants-in-aid to municipalities an important safety valve. Public works.
Roads, forests, water power, reclamation of land from the sea, garden cities.
Examination of these activities shews that none of them would act quickly
enough. They would provoke a violent reaction which would give a serious
set-back to Socialism. Nationalizations must be effected one at a time, and
be compensated. 279

62
WHY CONFISCATION HAS SUCCEEDED HITHERTO

Direct confiscation of income without compensation is already in vigorous
operation. Income tax, super tax, and estate duties. The Chancellor of the
Exchequer and his budget. Gladstone’s attitude towards income tax.
General agreement of Capitalist parties that all other means of raising
money shall be exhausted before levying taxes on income. Contrary
assumption of the proletarian Labor Party that the Capitalists should pay
first, not last. This issue underlies all the Budget debates. Estate duties
(“death duties”), though unsound economically, and often cruel and unfair
in operation, succeed in carrying Socialistic confiscation further in England
under Conservative Governments than some avowedly Socialistic ones

have been able to carry it abroad. The success of the operation is due to the
fact that the sums confiscated, though charged as percentages on capital
values, can be paid out of income directly or indirectly (by insuring or
borrowing), and are immediately thrown back into circulation by
Government expenditure. Thus income can be safely confiscated if
immediately redistributed; but the basic rule remains that the Government
must not confiscate more than it can spend productively. This is the
Socialist canon of taxation. 284

63
HOW THE WAR WAS PAID FOR

War must be paid for on the nail: armies cannot be fed nor slaughtered by
promissory notes. Men are obtained by conscription, and money partly by
direct taxation and inflation, but mainly by borrowing from the capitalists in
spite of the protests of the Labor Party against the exemption of capital
from conscription. The quaint result is that in order to pay the capitalists the
interest on their loans, the Chancellor of the Exchequer has to tax them so
heavily that, as a class, they are losing by the transaction. Robbing Peter,
who did not lend, to pay Paul, who did. As the property owners who hold
War Loan Stock gain at the expense of those who do not, a unanimous
Capitalist protest is impossible. An illustration. But the Labor contention
that it would pay the propertied class as a whole to cancel the National Debt
is none the less sound. Financing war by “funded” loans. As capital
invested in war is utterly and destructively consumed it does not, like
industrial capital, leave the nation better equipped for subsequent
production. The War Loan, though registered in the books of the Bank of
England as existing capital, is nothing but debt. The country is therefore
impoverished to meet interest charges on 7000 millions of non-existent
capital. There are reasons for not repudiating this debt directly; but as the
war produced an enormous consumption of capital and yet left the world
with less income to distribute than before, a veiled repudiation of at least
part of the debt is inevitable. Our method of repudiation is to redistribute
income as between the holders of War Loan and the other capitalists. But as
the huge borrowing and confiscation of capital that was feasible when the
Government had war employment ready for an unlimited number of
proletarians leaves them destitute now that the Government has
demobilized them without providing peace employment, the capitalists have

now to pay doles in addition to finding the money to pay themselves their
own interest. 289

64
NATIONAL DEBT REDEMPTION LEVIES

Though taxation of capital is nonsensical, all proposals in that form are not
necessarily impracticable. A Capitalist Government could, without requiring
ready money or disturbing the Stock Exchange or the Bank Rate, cancel the
domestic part of the National Debt to relieve private industry from taxation
by veiling the repudiation as a levy on capital values and accepting loan and
share scrip at face value in payment. Illustration. The objection to such a
procedure is that levies, as distinguished from established annual taxes, are
raids on private property. As such, they upset the sense of security which is
essential to social stability, and are extremely demoralizing to Governments
when once they are accepted as legitimate precedents. A raiding Chancellor
of the Exchequer would be a very undesirable one. The regular routine of
taxation of income and compensated nationalizations is available and
preferable. 294

65
THE CONSTRUCTIVE PROBLEM SOLVED

Recapitulation. The difficulty of applying the constructive program of
Socialism lies not in the practical but in the metaphysical part of the
business: the will to equality. When the Government finally acquires a
virtually complete control of the national income it will have the power to
distribute it unequally; and this possibility may enlist, and has to a certain
extent already enlisted, the most determined opponents of Socialism on the
side of its constructive political machinery. Thus Socialism ignorantly
pursued may lead to State Capitalism instead of to State Socialism, the
same road leading to both until the final distributive stage is reached. The
solution of the constructive problem of Socialism does not allay the terrors
of the alarmists who understand neither problem nor solution, and connect
nothing with the word Socialism except red ruin and the breaking up of
laws. Some examination of the effect of Socialism on institutions other than
economic must therefore be appended. 297

66
SHAM SOCIALISM

The War, by shewing how a Government can confiscate the incomes of one
set of citizens and hand them over to another set with or without the
intention of equalizing distribution or nationalizing industries or services,
shewed also how any predominant class, trade, or clique which can nobble
our Cabinet Ministers can use the power of the State for selfish ends by
measures disguised as reforms or political necessities. All retrogressions
and blunders, like all genuine reforms, are lucrative to somebody, and so
never lack plausible advocates. Illustrative cases of exploitation of the rates
and taxes and of private benevolence by Capitalism and Trade Unionism.
Public parks, endowed schools, garden cities, and subsidies. The
Government subsidy to the coal owners in 1925 not Socialistic nor even
Capitalistic, but simply unbusinesslike. Poplarism. Mischief done by
subsidies and doles. Subsidies plus Poplarism burn the candle at both ends.
The danger of conscious and deliberate exploitation of the coercive and
confiscatory powers of the Government by private or sectional interests is
greatly increased by the modern American practice of employing first-rate
brains as such in industrial enterprise. The American Trade Unions are
following this example. Surprising results. What its adoption by English
Trade Unions will mean. Socialists will still have to insist on equalization
of income to prevent Capitalist big business and the aristocracy of Trade
Unionism controlling Collectivist Governments for their private ends. 299

67
CAPITALISM IN PERPETUAL MOTION

Nothing stays put. Literal Conservatism impossible. Human society is like a
glacier, apparently stationary, always in motion, always changing. To
understand the changes that are happening, and the others that are coming,
it is necessary to understand the changes that have gone before. Examples
of every phase in economic evolution still survive and can be studied from
life. Without such study we are liable to be misguided and corrupted or
exasperated. Those adventures of Capitalism in pursuit of profits which
took the form of thrilling exploits by extraordinary individuals with no
sordid aims are narrated as the splendid history of our race. On the other
hand, the more shameful episodes in that pursuit may be imputed to the

greed of capitalists instead of to the ferocity and bigotry of their agents.
Both views may be discounted as special pleadings. A capitalist may
accidentally be a genius just as she may be a fool or a criminal. But a
capitalist as such is only a person with spare money and a legal right to
withhold it from the hungry. No special ability or quality of any sort beyond
ordinary prudence and selfishness is involved in the capitalist’s function:
the solicitor and stockbroker, the banker and employer, will carry the capital
to the proletarians and see that when consuming it they replace it with
interest. The most intelligent woman can do no better than invest her
money, which does far more good when invested than when spent in
charity. But the employers and financiers who exploit her capital are
pressed by the exhaustion of home markets and old industries to finance
adventurous and experimental geniuses who explore and invent and
conquer. They cannot concern themselves with the effect of these
enterprises on the world or even on the nation provided they bring back
money to the shareholders. Capital, to save itself from rotting, has to be
ruthless in its ceaseless search for investment; and mere Conservatism is of
no avail against this iron necessity. Its chartered companies. It adds India,
Borneo, Rhodesia to the white Englishman’s burden of its naval and
military defence. It may yet shift our capital from Middlesex to Asia or
West Africa. Our helplessness in such an event. No need to pack up yet; but
we must get rid of static conceptions of civilization and geography. 308

68
THE RUNAWAY CAR OF CAPITALISM

Controlled motion is a good thing; but the motion of Capital is
uncontrollable and dangerous. As the future of civilization depends on
Governments gaining control of the forces that are running away with
Capitalism an understanding of them is necessary. Very few people do
understand them. The Government does not: neither do the voters. The
difference between Governments and governed. The Governments know
the need for government and want to govern. The governed have no such
knowledge: they resent government and desire freedom. This resentment,
which is the central weakness of Democracy, was not of great importance
when the people had no votes, as under Queen Elizabeth and Cromwell. But
when great extensions of government and taxation came to be required to
control and supplant Capitalism, bourgeois Democracy produced an

increase of electoral resistance to government; and proletarian Democracy
has continued the bourgeois tradition. The resultant paralysis of Parliament
has produced a demand for dictatorships; and Europe has begun to clamor
for political disciplinarians. Between our inability to govern well and our
unwillingness to be governed at all, we furnish examples of the abuses of
power and the horrors of liberty without ascertaining the limits of either.
314

69
THE NATURAL LIMIT TO LIBERTY

We are not born free: Nature is the supreme tyrant, and in our latitudes a
hard taskmaster. Commercial progress has been at root nothing more than
inventing ways of doing Nature’s tasks with less labor: in short, saving
labor and winning leisure. Some examples. Actually Liberty is Leisure.
Political liberations cannot add to liberty unless they add to leisure. For
example: woman’s daily routine. Sleep, feeding, resting, and locomotion are
not leisure: they are compulsory. A seven hour working day gives at most
six hours leisure out of the seventeen non-working hours. The woman of
property. Leisure is the incentive to attain her position. All wage workers
value leisure more than money. Property coveted because it confers the
maximum of leisure. Nevertheless, as leisure brings freedom, and freedom
brings responsibility and self-determination, it is dreaded by those
accustomed to tutelage: for instance, soldiers and domestic servants. The
national fund of leisure. Its present misdistribution. Description of a
hypothetical four hours working day. Exceptions to intermittent labor at
regular hours. Pregnancy and nursing. Artistic, scientific, and political
work. Fixed daily hours only a basis for calculation. A four hours day may
mean in practice six days a month, two months a year, or an earlier
retirement. Difference between routine work and creative work. Complete
freedom impossible even during leisure. Legislative restraints on religion,
sport, and marriage. The Inhibition Complex and the Punch baby. The
contrary or Anarchic Complex. The instinctive resistance to Socialism as
slavery obscures its aspect as a guarantee of the maximum possible of
leisure and therefore of liberty. 319

70
RENT OF ABILITY

The proper social use of brains. Methods of making exceptional personal
talents lucrative. When the talents are popular, as in the case of artists,
surgeons, sports champions and the like, they involve hard work and confer
no political or industrial power. As their lucrativeness is a function of their
scarcity their power to enrich their possessors is not formidable and is
controllable by taxation. Occasional freak incomes would not matter if
equality of income were general. Impossibility of living more expensively
than the richest class. Millionaires give away money for this reason. Special
case of the talent for exploitation, which is a real social danger. Its forms.
Administrative ability. The ability to exercise authority and enforce
discipline. Both are indispensable in industry and in all organized activities.
When tactfully exercised they are not unpopular, as most of us like to be
saved the trouble of thinking for ourselves and so are not averse from being
directed. Authority and subordination in themselves are never unpopular;
but Capitalism, by creating class differences and associating authority with
insolence, destroys the social equality which is indispensable to voluntary
subordination. Scolding, slave driving, cursing, kicking, and slacking.
Reluctance to obey commanders who are trusted and liked is less likely to
give trouble than reluctance to command. Fortunately, persons of
exceptional ability do not need any special inducement to exercise it.
Instances of their failure in subordinate employment. In our socialized
services they do not demand excessive incomes. The demand of the real
lady or gentleman. Both are compelled to act as cads in capitalist
commerce, in which organizers and financiers, by reason of their special
cunning, are able to extort prodigious shares of the country’s output as “rent
of ability.” The meaning of rent. It cannot be abolished but it can be
nationalized. Futility of recriminations as to indispensability between
employers and employed. The talent of the exploiter is as indispensable to
the landlord and capitalist as to the proletarian. Directed labor is
indispensable to all three. Nationalization and equalization socializes rent of
ability as well as rent of land and capital by defeating its private
appropriation. 331

71
PARTY POLITICS

The steps to Socialism will not necessarily be taken by Socialist
Governments. Many of them may be taken, as some already have, by anti-

Socialist Cabinets. The growth of the Labor Party and the enormous
electoral preponderance of the proletarian electorate promises a complete
Labor conquest of the House of Commons. In that case the victorious Labor
Party would split into several irreconcilable groups and make parliamentary
government impossible unless it contained a unanimous Socialist majority
of members really clear in their minds as to what Socialism exactly means.
Precedent in the Long Parliament. The danger is not peculiar to Labor. Any
political party obtaining complete possession of Parliament may go to
pieces and end in a dictatorship. The Conservative triumph produced by the
anti-Russian scare of 1924 made it almost impossible to hold the party
together. Large majorities in Parliament, far from enabling Cabinets to do
what they like, destroy their cohesion and enfeeble their party.
Demoralization of Parliament during the period of large majorities brought
in by the South African war. Concealment of preparations for the war of
1914-18. Parliamentary value of the fact that Socialism cannot be shaken by
political storms and changes. 343

72
THE PARTY SYSTEM

Popular ignorance of what the term Party System really means.
Enslavement of voters by the system, in and out of Parliament. Its
advantage is that if the House of Commons has good leaders the quality of
the rank and file does not matter. How it was introduced as a war measure
by William III. Under it the upshot of the General Elections is determined
not by the staunch party voters but by the floating body of independent
electors who follow their impulses without regard to the Party System. The
system is essentially a two-party system of solid majority Government party
versus solid minority Opposition party. When independence prevails,
groups form, each in a minority in the House; and only by combining
enough groups to form a majority can any leader form a Cabinet and carry
on. Such combinations are called Blocks. They have little cohesion, and do
not last. The French Chamber exhibits this phenomenon. Possibility of its
occurring in the House of Commons. Alternative systems. Government by
committees without a Cabinet as practised by our municipalities. This is a
local survival of the old system of separate King’s cabinets upon which the
Party System was imposed. The non-party methods of local government are
quite efficient. Increasing tendency to lessen the rigidity of the Party

System in Parliament by declaring more and more questions non-party.
Tendency of Governments to resign on defeated votes of confidence only.
Inadequacy of our two Houses of Parliament for the work put upon them by
modern conditions. Need for changes involving the creation of new
chambers. The Webb proposals. 348

73
DIVISIONS WITHIN THE LABOR PARTY

Questions on which the present apparent unanimity in the parliamentary
Labor Party is delusive: for instance, the Right to Strike. Socialism and
Compulsory Social Service versus Trade Unionism and Freedom of
Contract. A Bill to enforce social service and penalize strikes would split
the party. Magnitude of modern strikes through the extension of Trade
Unionism from crafts to industries. Modern strikes tend to become
devastating civil wars. Arguments for Compulsory Labor. Military and civil
service. When the issue is joined the non-Socialist Trade Unionists will
combine with the Conservatives against the Socialists. 354

74
RELIGIOUS DISSENSIONS

The nation’s children. Religious teaching in public schools. Impossibility of
expressing the multifarious conflict of opinions on this subject by a two-
party conflict in the House of Commons. Sectarian private schools. Roman
Catholic and Nonconformist scruples. Passive resistance. Impracticable
solutions. Cowper-Templeism. The Bible and Copernican astronomy.
Modern physics and evolutional biology. Men professing science are as
bigoted as ecclesiastics. Secular education impossible because children
must be taught conduct, and the ultimate sanctions of conduct are
metaphysical. Weakness of the punishment system. Conceptions of God.
Personifications of God as the Big Papa and the Roman Catholic Big
Mamma needed for children. Voltaire and Robespierre anticipated in the
nursery. Comte’s law of the three stages of belief. Tendency of parents,
voters, elected persons, and governments to impose their religions, customs,
names, institutions, and even their languages on everyone by force. Such
substitutions may be progressive. Toleration is incompatible with complete
sectarian conviction: the historic tolerations were only armistices or

exhaustions after drawn battles. Examples of modern bigotry. Toleration is
impossible as between Capitalism and Socialism. It is therefore necessary to
demonstrate that a Labor Party can neither establish Socialism by
exterminating its opponents, nor its opponents avert it by exterminating the
Socialists. 359

75
REVOLUTIONS

Difference between revolutions and elections or ordinary reforms.
Revolutions transfer political power from one faction or leader to another
by violence or the threat of violence. Examples from English history. The
transfer of political power from our capitalists to our proletarians has
already taken place in form but not in substance, because, as our proletariat
is half parasitic on Capitalism, and only half productive and self-supporting,
half the proletarians are on the side of Capitalism. “Ye are many: they are
few” is a dangerously misleading slogan. Consciousness of their formidable
proletarian backing may embolden the capitalists to refuse to accept a
parliamentary decision on any issue which involves a serious encroachment
of Socialism on Private Property. The case of Ireland, and the simultaneous
post-war repudiations of parliamentary supremacy in several continental
countries forbid us to dismiss this possibility as unlikely. But whether our
political decisions are made by votes or by blood and iron the mere
decisions to make changes and the overruling of their opponents cannot
effect any changes except nominal ones. The Russian Revolution effected a
complete change from absolute monarchy to proletarian republicanism and
proclaimed the substitution of Communism for Capitalism; but the
victorious Communists found themselves obliged to fall back on Capitalism
and do their best to control it. Their difficulties were greatly increased by
the destruction involved by violent revolution. Communism can spread only
as a development of existing economic civilization and must be thrown
back by any sudden overthrow of it. “The inevitability of gradualness” does
not imply any inevitability of peaceful change; but Socialists will be
strongly opposed to civil war if their opponents do not force it on them by
repudiating peaceful methods, because though civil war may clear the way
it can bring the goal no nearer. The lesson of history on this point. The
French Revolution and the mot of Fouquier Tinville. Socialism must
therefore be discussed on its own merits as an order of society apart from

the methods by which the necessary political power to establish it may be
attained. 370

76
CHANGE MUST BE PARLIAMENTARY

As peaceful settlement of the struggle for political supremacy between the
Capitalists and the Socialists cannot be guaranteed we must resign
ourselves to the unpleasant possibilities of our sedulously glorified
pugnacity. But as destructive quarreling must be followed by constructive
co-operation if civilization is to be maintained the consummation of
Socialism can proceed when the fighting is over. A civil war can therefore
be only an interruption and need not be further considered. Socialism in
Parliament. How a series of properly prepared and compensated
nationalizations may be voted for by intelligent politicians who are not
Socialists, and carried out without disturbing the routine to which the
unthinking masses are accustomed. Importance of the preparations: every
nationalization will require extensions of the civil and municipal services.
Socialism at one stroke is impossible. How far it must stop short of its
logical completion. 380

77
SUBSIDIZED PRIVATE ENTERPRISE

Private commercial enterprise will not be completely superseded by
nationalization; but it may become bankrupt; and in that case it may
demand and receive subsidies from the Government. A simple instance.
This process, long familiar in cultural institutions, has now begun in big
business: for example the Government subsidy to coal owners in 1925, the
Capitalists thus themselves establishing the practice, and providing
precedents for the subsidizing of private experimental ventures by Socialist
Governments. Direct industrial nationalizations must be confined to well-
established routine services. When State-financed private ventures succeed,
and thereby cease to be experimental, they can be nationalized, throwing
back private enterprise on its proper business of novelty, invention, and
experiment. The objections of doctrinaire nationalizers. The Socialist
objective is not nationalization but equalization of income, nationalization
being only a means to that end. The abuse of subsidies. Looting the

taxpayer. Subsidies as mortgages. The national war factories. Their sale to
private bidders after the war as an illustration of the impossibility of
nationalizing or retaining anything for which the Government cannot find
immediate use. 386

78
HOW LONG WILL IT TAKE?

If it takes too long a revolutionary explosion may wreck civilization.
Equality of income can be attained and maintained only in a settled and
highly civilized society under a Government with a highly trained civil
service and an elaborate code of laws, fortified by general moral approval.
The process of its establishment will necessarily be dangerously slow rather
than dangerously quick; for we are not educated to be Socialists: we teach
children that Socialism is wicked. The material advantages of the steps
towards Socialism are, however, biassing proletarian parents, who are in a
huge majority, more and more in favor of the movement towards Socialism.
This tendency is helped by the moral revolt against the cruelty of
Capitalism in its operation and the sordidness of its principle. In a Socialist
State economic selfishness would probably stand on the moral level now
occupied by cardsharping instead of being held up as the key to social
eminence. 391

79
SOCIALISM AND LIBERTY

Nervous dread of over-regulation produced by the endless inspections and
restrictions needed to protect the proletariat from unbridled Capitalist
exploitation. These would have no sense in a Socialist state. Examples.
Preoccupation of the police with the enforcement of private property rights
and with the crimes and disorder caused by poverty. The drink question.
Drink the great anæsthetic. Artificial happiness indispensable under
Capitalism. Dutch courage. Drugs. Compulsory prophylactics as substitutes
for sanitation. Direct restrictions of liberty by private property. “The right to
roam.” Deer forests and sheep runs. Existing liberties which Socialism
would abolish. The liberty to be idle. Nonsense about capital and not labor
being source of wealth. The case of patents and copyrights. Unofficial
tyrannies. Fashion. Estate rules. The value of conventionality. 393

80
SOCIALISM AND MARRIAGE

Socialists apt to forget that people object to new liberties more than to new
laws. Marriage varies from frontier to frontier. Civil marriage. Religious
and communist celibacy, or the negation of marriage. Socialism has nothing
to do with these varieties, as equality of income applies impartially to them
all. Why there is nevertheless a rooted belief that Socialism will alter
marriage. The legend of Russian “nationalization of women”. Where
women and children are economically dependent on husbands and fathers
marriage is slavery for wives and home a prison for children. Socialism, by
making them economically independent, would break the chain and open
the prison door. Probable results. Improvement in domestic manners. The
State should intervene to divorce separated couples, thus abolishing the
present power of the parties to enforce a broken tie vindictively or
religiously. Clash of Church and State on marriage. The State must
intervene to control population. As Socialism would clear away the
confusion into which Capitalism, with its inevitable result of parasitic labor
and premature overpopulation, has plunged the subject, a Socialist state is
more likely to interfere than a Capitalist one. Expedients. Limitation of
families. Encouragement of families. Polygamy. Experience of the Latter
Day Saints (Mormons) on this point. Bounties for large families plus
persecution of birth control. State endowment of parentage. Compulsory
parentage. Monogamy practicable only when the numbers of the sexes are
equal. Case of a male-destroying war. Conflicting domestic ideals affecting
population. The Bass Rock ideal. The Boer ideal. The bungalow ideal. The
monster hotel ideal. 406

81
SOCIALISM AND CHILDREN

The State school child. Need for the protection of children against parents.
The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. The new Adoption
Act. Need for the organization of child life as such. Schools essentially
prisons. General ignorance after nine years of enforced elementary
schooling. Limits of child liberty. The real nature and purpose of education.
Our stupidities about it. Injury done by forcing children to learn things
beyond their capacity or foreign to their aptitudes. Girls and compulsory

Beethoven. Boys and compulsory classics and mathematics. Eton began by
forbidding play and now makes it compulsory. Children as animals to be
tamed by beating and sacks to be filled with learning. Opportunities for the
Sadist and child fancier. Children in school are outlawed. Typical case of
assault. Unendurable strain of the relations between teachers and children.
Schools, though educationally disastrous, have the incidental advantage of
encouraging promiscuous social intercourse. University manners. Middle
class manners. Garden City and Summer School manners. Need for
personal privacy and free choice of company not supplied by the snobbery
and class segregations of Capitalism. Socialism preferable on this score.
Technical education for citizenship. As knowledge must not be withheld on
the ground that it is as efficient for evil as for good, it must be accompanied
by moral instruction and ethical inculcation. Doctrines a Socialist state
could not tolerate. Variety and incompatibility of British religions. Original
sin. Brimstone damnation. Children’s souls need protection more than their
bodies. The Bible. A common creed necessary to citizenship. Certain
prejudices must be inculcated. Need for an official second nature. Limits to
State proselytizing. Beyond the irreducible minimum of education the hand
should be left to find its own employment and the mind its own food. 412

82
SOCIALISM AND THE CHURCHES

Will a Socialist State tolerate a Church? This question must be discussed
objectively. Survey of the age-long struggle between Church and State for
the control of political and social institutions. The Inquisition and the Star
Chamber. Theocracy has not lost its power. Mormon Theocracy. Christian
Science. Both have come into conflict with the secular government. New
Churches capture secular Governments by denying that they are Churches.
The persecutions and fanaticisms of today rage in the name of Science. The
avowed Church of Christ Scientist versus the masked Church of Jenner and
Pasteur, Scientists. Tests for public office, governing bodies, and
professions. Church of England tests broken by the English people refusing
to remain in one Church. The Quakers. Admission to Parliament of
Dissenters, then of Jews, finally of Atheists, leading to civil marriage and
burial and the substitution of civil registration of birth for baptism, leaves
the State in the grip of pseudo-scientific orthodoxy. Extravagances of this
new faith in America and the new European republics. The assets of

religion are also the assets of science. The masses, indifferent to both, are
ungovernable without an inculcated faith (the official second nature).
Modern conflicts between secular authority and Church doctrine.
Cremation. Rights of animals. Use of cathedrals. The Russian situation: the
State tolerating the Church whilst denouncing its teaching as dope. Such
contemptuously tolerant anti-clericalism is necessarily transient: positive
teaching being indispensable. Subjective religion. Courage. Redskin ideals.
Man as hunter-warrior with Woman as everything else. Political uselessness
of ferocity and sportsmanship. Fighting men cowardly and lazy as thinkers.
Women anxious lest Socialism should attack their religion. It need not do so
unless inequality of income is part of their religion. But they must beware
of attempts to constitute Socialism as a Catholic Church with an infallible
prophet and Savior. The Moscow Third International is essentially such a
Church, with Karl Marx as its prophet. It must come into conflict with the
Soviet and be mastered by it. We need not, however, repudiate its doctrine
and vituperate its prophet on that account any more than we need repudiate
the teaching of Christ and vilify his character when we insist that the State
and not the Church shall govern England. The merits of Marx. 429

83
CURRENT CONFUSIONS

The Intelligent Woman must resist the impulse to intervene in
conversational bickerings and letters to the Press about Socialism and
Capitalism by people who understand neither. Meaningless vituperation and
general misuse of nomenclature. Politicians misname themselves as well as
oneanother. Self-contradictory names such as Communist-Anarchist. Real
distinctions. Direct Action versus Fabianism. Poor Man’s Capitalism: its
forms. It often masquerades as Socialism. The assumption of the name
Communist by the cruder sort of Direct-Actionists produces the anomaly of
a Labor Party expelling Communists whilst advocating Communist
legislation. Fascism, produced by impatient disgust with Parliament as an
institution, is common to the extreme Right and the extreme Left. Methods
of Direct Action. The General Strike. Its absurdity. Its futility as a
preventive of war. Pacifism. Supernational social organization. Empires and
Commonwealths. Confusions as to Democracy. Proletarian jealousy of
official power. Resultant autocracy in the Trade Unions. Labor leaders more
arbitrary than Peers, and much more cynical as to working class political

capacity than middle class and aristocratic idealists. Democracy in practice
has never been democratic; and the millennial hopes based on every
extension of the franchise, from the Reform Bill of 1832 to Votes for
Women, have been disappointed. The reaction. Discipline for everybody
and votes for nobody. Why women should stick resolutely to their votes.
Proportional Representation opposed by the Labor Party. Need for a
scientific test of political capacity. Those who use democracy as a stepping
stone to political power oppose it as a dangerous nuisance when they get
there. Its real object is to establish a genuine aristocracy. To do this we must
first ascertain which are the aristocrats; and it is here that popular voting
fails. Mrs Everybody votes for Mrs Somebody only to discover that she has
elected Mrs Noisy Nobody. 443

84
PERORATION

A last word. Danger of discouragement through excessive sympathy. Public
evils are fortunately not millionfold evils. Suffering is not cumulative; but
waste is; and the Socialist revolt is against waste. Honor, health, and joy of
heart are impossible under Capitalism: rich and poor are alike detestable:
both must cease to exist. Our need for neighbors whose interests do not
compete with ours is against the principle of Capitalism. Waiting for dead
men’s shoes. The professions. Husband hunting. The social friction is
intense: Capitalism puts sand instead of oil in all the bearings of our
machinery. The remonstrance of the optimist. Natural kindliness.
Capitalism itself was better-intentioned in its inception than early
Christianity. Goodwill is not enough: it is dangerous until it finds the right
way. Unreasoning sentiment an unsafe guide. We believe what we want to
believe: if a pecuniary bias is given to our activities it will corrupt them in
institution, teaching, and practice until the best intentioned citizens will
know no honest methods and doctrines. In our search for disinterested
service we come up against profiteering and Trade Unionism at every turn.
Resultant cynicism and pessimism. Gulliver’s Travels and Candide.
Equality of income would make these terrible books mere clinical lectures
on an extinct disease. The simple and noble meaning of gentility. 455
APPENDIX

Instead of a bibliography. The technical literature of Capitalism and
Socialism mostly abstract, inhuman, and written in an academic jargon
which only specialists find readable. Failure to define either capital or
Socialism. The early Capitalist economists: their candor. Ricardo, De
Quincey, and Austin. The Socialist reaction: Proudhon and Marx. The
academic reaction: John Stuart Mill, Cairnes, and Maynard Keynes. The
artistic reaction: Ruskin, Carlyle, and Morris. The reaction of the novelists:
Dickens and Wells, Galsworthy and Bennett. The reaction in the theatre:
Ibsen and Strindberg. Henry George and Land Nationalization. Literature of
the conversion of Socialism from an insurrectionary movement in the
Liberal tradition to a constitutional one. Fabian Essays. Sidney and Beatrice
Webb. The author’s contributions. 465
Index 471

THE INTELLIGENT WOMAN’S GUIDE TO
SOCIALISM AND CAPITALISM

1
A CLOSED QUESTION OPENS

I T would be easy, dear madam, to refer you to the many books on
modern Socialism which have been published since it became a
respectable constitutional question in this country in the eighteen-
eighties. But I strongly advise you not to read a line of them until you and
your friends have discussed for yourselves how wealth should be
distributed in a respectable civilized country, and arrived at the best
conclusion you can.
For Socialism is nothing but an opinion held by some people on that point.
Their opinion is not necessarily better than your opinion or anyone else’s.
How much should you have and how much should your neighbors have?
What is your own answer?
As it is not a settled question, you must clear your mind of the fancy with
which we all begin as children, that the institutions under which we live,
including our legal ways of distributing income and allowing people to own
things, are natural, like the weather. They are not. Because they exist
everywhere in our little world, we take it for granted that they have always
existed and must always exist, and that they are self-acting. That is a
dangerous mistake. They are in fact transient makeshifts; and many of them
would not be obeyed, even by well-meaning people, if there were not a
policeman within call and a prison within reach. They are being changed
continually by Parliament, because we are never satisfied with them.
Sometimes they are scrapped for new ones; sometimes they are altered;
sometimes they are simply done away with as nuisances. The new ones
have to be stretched in the law courts to make them fit, or to prevent them
fitting too well if the judges happen to dislike them. There is no end to this
scrapping and altering and innovating. New laws are made to compel
people to do things they never dreamt of doing before (buying insurance
stamps, for instance). Old laws are repealed to allow people to do what they

used to be punished for doing (marrying their deceased wives’ sisters and
husbands’ brothers, for example). Laws that are not repealed are amended
and amended and amended like a child’s knickers until there is hardly a
shred of the first stuff left. At the elections some candidates get votes by
promising to make new laws or to get rid of old ones, and others by
promising to keep things just as they are. This is impossible. Things will not
stay as they are.
Changes that nobody ever believed possible take place in a few generations.
Children nowadays think that spending nine years in school, old-age and
widows’ pensions, votes for women, and short-skirted ladies in Parliament
or pleading in barristers’ wigs in the courts, are part of the order of Nature,
and always were and ever shall be; but their greatgrandmothers would have
set down anyone who told them that such things were coming as mad, and
anyone who wanted them to come as wicked.
When studying how the wealth we produce every year should be shared
among us, we must not be like either the children or the greatgrandmothers.
We must bear constantly in mind that our shares are being changed almost
every day on one point or another whilst Parliament is sitting, and that
before we die the sharing will be different, for better or worse, from the
sharing of today, just as the sharing of today differs from the nineteenth
century sharing more than Queen Victoria could have believed possible.
The moment you begin to think of our present sharing as a fixture, you
become a fossil. Every change in our laws takes money, directly or
indirectly, out of somebody’s pocket (perhaps yours) and puts it into
somebody else’s. This is why one set of politicians demands each change
and another set opposes it.
So what you have to consider is not whether there will be great changes or
not (for changes there certainly will be) but what changes you and your
friends think, after consideration and discussion, would make the world a
better place to live in, and what changes you ought to resist as disastrous to
yourself and everyone else. Every opinion you arrive at in this way will
become a driving force as part of the public opinion which in the long run
must be at the back of all the changes if they are to abide, and at the back of
the policemen and jailers who have to enforce them, right or wrong, once
they are made the law of the land.

It is important that you should have opinions of your own on this subject.
Never forget that the old law of the natural philosophers, that Nature abhors
a vacuum, is true of the human head. There is no such thing as an empty
head, though there are heads so impervious to new ideas that they are for all
mental purposes solid, like billiard balls. I know that you have not that sort
of head, because, if you had, you would not be reading this book. Therefore
I warn you that if you leave the smallest corner of your head vacant for a
moment, other people’s opinions will rush in from all quarters, from
advertisements, from newspapers, from books and pamphlets, from gossip,
from political speeches, from plays and pictures—and, you will add, from
this book!
Well, of course I do not deny it. When I urge you to think for yourself (as
all our nurses and mothers and schoolmistresses do even though they clout
our heads the moment our conclusions differ from theirs) I do not mean that
you should shut your eyes to everyone else’s opinions. I myself, though I
am by way of being a professional thinker, have to content myself with
secondhand opinions on a great many most important subjects on which I
can neither form an opinion of my own nor criticize the opinions I take
from others. I take the opinion of the Astronomer Royal as to when it is
twelve o’clock; and if I am in a strange town I take the opinion of the first
person I meet in the street as to the way to the railway station. If I go to law
I have to consent to the absurd but necessary dogma that the king can do no
wrong. Otherwise trains would be no use to me, and lawsuits could never be
finally settled. We should never arrive anywhere or do anything if we did
not believe what we are told by people who ought to know better than
ourselves, and agree to stand by certain dogmas of the infallibility of
authorities whom we nevertheless know to be fallible. Thus on most
subjects we are forced by our ignorance to proceed with closed minds in
spite of all exhortations to think boldly for ourselves, and be, above all
things, original.
St Paul, a rash and not very deep man, as his contempt for women shews,
cried “Prove all things: hold fast that which is good”. He forgot that it is
quite impossible for one woman to prove all things: she has not the time
even if she had the knowledge. For a busy woman there are no Open
Questions: everything is settled except the weather; and even that is settled
enough for her to buy the right clothes for summer and winter. Why, then,

did St Paul give a counsel which he must have known to be impracticable if
he ever thought about it for five minutes?
The explanation is that the Settled Questions are never really settled,
because the answers to them are never complete and final truths. We make
laws and institutions because we cannot live in society without them. We
cannot make perfect institutions because we are not perfect ourselves. Even
if we could make perfect institutions, we could not make eternal and
universal ones, because the conditions change, and the laws and institutions
that work well with fifty enclosed nuns in a convent would be impossible in
a nation of forty million people at large. So we have to do the best we can at
the moment, leaving posterity free to do better if it can. When we have
made our laws in this makeshift way, the questions they concern are settled
for the moment only. And in politics the moment may be twelve months or
twelve hundred years, a mere breathing space or a whole epoch.
Consequently there come crises in history when questions that have been
closed for centuries suddenly yawn wide open. It was in the teeth of one of
these terrible yawns that St Paul cried that there are no closed questions,
that we must think out everything for ourselves all over again. In his Jewish
world nothing was more sacred than the law of Moses, and nothing more
indispensable than the rite of circumcision. All law and all religion seemed
to depend on them; yet St Paul had to ask the Jews to throw over the law of
Moses for the contrary law of Christ, declaring that circumcision did not
matter, as it was baptism that was essential to salvation. How could he help
preaching the open mind and the inner light as against all laws and
institutions whatever?
You are now in the position of the congregations of St Paul. We are all in it
today. A question that has been practically closed for a whole epoch, the
question of the distribution of wealth and the nature of property, has
suddenly yawned wide open before us; and we all have to open our closed
minds accordingly.
When I say that it has opened suddenly, I am not forgetting that it never has
been closed completely for thoughtful people whose business it was to
criticize institutions. Hundreds of years before St Paul was born, prophets
crying in the wilderness had protested against the abominations that were
rampant under the Mosaic law, and prophesied a Savior who would redeem

us from its inhumanity. I am not forgetting either that for hundreds of years
past our own prophets, whom we call poets or philosophers or divines, have
been protesting against the division of the nation into rich and poor, idle and
overworked. But there comes finally a moment at which the question that
has been kept ajar only by persecuted prophets for a few disciples springs
wide open for everybody; and the persecuted prophets with their tiny
congregations of cranks grow suddenly into formidable parliamentary
Oppositions which presently become powerful Governments.
Langland and Latimer and Sir Thomas More, John Bunyan and George
Fox, Goldsmith and Crabbe and Shelley, Carlyle and Ruskin and Morris,
with many brave and faithful preachers, in the Churches and out of them, of
whom you have never heard, were our English prophets. They kept the
question open for those who had some spark of their inspiration; but prosaic
everyday women and men paid no attention until, within my lifetime and
yours, quite suddenly ordinary politicians, sitting on the front benches of
the House of Commons and of all the European legislatures, with vast and
rapidly growing bodies of ordinary respectable voters behind them, began
clamoring that the existing distribution of wealth is so anomalous,
monstrous, ridiculous, and unbearably mischievous, that it must be radically
changed if civilization is to be saved from the wreck to which all the older
civilizations we know of were brought by this very evil.
That is why you must approach the question as an unsettled one, with your
mind as open as you can get it. And it is from my own experience in dealing
with such questions that I strongly advise you not to wait for a readymade
answer from me or anyone else, but to try first to solve the problem for
yourself in your own way. For even if you solve it all wrong, you will
become not only intensely interested in it, but much better able to
understand and appreciate the right solution when it comes along.

2
DIVIDING-UP

E
VERYBODY knows now that Socialism is a proposal to divide-up
the income of the country in a new way. What you perhaps have not
noticed is that the income of the country is being divided-up every
day and even every minute at present, and must continue to be divided-up
every day as long as there are two people left on earth to divide it. The only
possible difference of opinion is not as to whether it shall be divided or not,
but as to how much each person should have, and on what conditions he
should be allowed to have it. St Paul said “He that will not work, neither
shall he eat”; but as he was only a man with a low opinion of women, he
forgot the babies. Babies cannot work, and are shockingly greedy; but if
they were not fed there would soon be nobody left alive in the world. So
that will not do.
Some people imagine that because they can save money the wealth of the
world can be stored up. Stuff and nonsense. Most of the wealth that keeps
us alive will not last a week. The world lives from hand to mouth. A
drawingroom poker will last a lifetime; but we cannot live by eating
drawingroom pokers; and though we do all we can to make our food keep
by putting eggs into water-glass, tinning salmon, freezing mutton, and
turning milk into dry goods, the hard fact remains that unless most of our
food is eaten within a few days of its being baked or killed it will go stale or
rotten, and choke or poison us. Even our clothes will not last very long if
we work hard in them; and there is the washing. You may put india-rubber
patches on your boot soles to prevent the soles wearing out; but then the
patches will wear out.
Every year must bring its own fresh harvest and its new generations of
sheep and cattle: we cannot live on what is left of last year’s harvest; and as
next year’s does not yet exist, we must live in the main on this year’s,
making things and using them up, sowing and reaping, brewing and baking,
breeding and butchering (unless we are vegetarians like myself), soiling and
washing, or else dying of dirt and starvation. What is called saving is only

making bargains for the future. For instance, if I bake a hundred and one
loaves of bread, I can eat no more than the odd one; and I cannot save the
rest, because they will be uneatable in a week. All I can do is to bargain
with somebody who wants a hundred loaves to be eaten on the spot by
himself and his family and persons in his employment, that if I give my
hundred spare loaves to him he will give me, say, five new loaves to eat
every year in future. But that is not saving up the loaves. It is only a bargain
between two parties: one who wants to provide for the future, and another
who wants to spend heavily in the present. Consequently I cannot save until
I find somebody else who wants to spend. The notion that we could all save
together is silly: the truth is that only a few well-off people who have more
than they need can afford to provide for their future in this way; and they
could not do it were there not others spending more than they possess. Peter
must spend what Paul saves, or Paul’s savings will go rotten. Between the
two nothing is saved. The nation as a whole must make its bread and eat it
as it goes along. A nation which stopped working would be dead in a
fortnight even if every man, woman, and child in it had houses and lands
and a million of money in the savings bank. When you see the rich man’s
wife (or anyone else’s wife) shaking her head over the thriftlessness of the
poor because they do not all save, pity the lady’s ignorance; but do not
irritate the poor by repeating her nonsense to them.

3
HOW MUCH FOR EACH?

Y
OU now realize that a great baking and making and serving and
counting must take place every day; and that when the loaves and
other things are made they must be divided-up immediately, each of
us getting her or his legally appointed share. What should that share be?
How much is each of us to have; and why is each of us to have that much
and neither more nor less? If the hardworking widow with six children is
getting two loaves a week whilst some idle and dissolute young bachelor is
wasting enough every day to feed six working families for a month, is that a
sensible way of dividing-up? Would it not be better to give more to the
widow and less to the bachelor? These questions do not settle themselves:
they have to be settled by law. If the widow takes one of the bachelor’s
loaves the police will put her in prison, and send her children to the
workhouse. They do that because there is a law that her share is only two
loaves. That law can be repealed or altered by parliament if the people
desire it and vote accordingly. Most people, when they learn this, think the
law ought to be altered. When they read in the papers that an American
widow left with one baby boy, and an allowance of one hundred and fifty
pounds a week to bring him up on, went to the courts to complain that it
was not enough, and had the allowance increased to two hundred, whilst
other widows who had worked hard early and late all their lives, and
brought up large families, were ending their days in the workhouse, they
feel that there is something monstrously unjust and wicked and stupid in
such a dividing-up, and that it must be changed. They get it changed a little
by taking back some of the rich American widow’s share in taxes, and
giving it to the poor in old-age pensions and widows’ pensions and
unemployment doles and “free” elementary education and other things. But
if the American widow still has more than a hundred pounds a week for the
keep of her baby boy, and a large income for herself besides, whilst the poor
widow at the other end of the town has only ten shillings a week pension
between her and the workhouse, the difference is still so unfair that we
hardly notice the change. Everybody wants a fairer division except the

people who get the best of it; and as they are only one in ten of the
population, and many of them recognize the injustice of their own position,
we may take it that there is a general dissatisfaction with the existing daily
division of wealth, and a general intention to alter it as soon as possible
among those who realize that it can be altered.
But you cannot alter anything unless you know what you want to alter it to.
It is no use saying that it is scandalous that Mrs A. should have a thousand
pounds a day and poor Mrs B. only half a crown. If you want the law
altered you must be prepared to say how much you think Mrs A. should
have, and how much Mrs B. should have. And that is where the real trouble
begins. We are all ready to say that Mrs B. ought to have more, and Mrs A.
less; but when we are asked to say exactly how much more and how much
less, some say one thing; others say another; and most of us have nothing to
say at all except perhaps that Mrs A. ought to be ashamed of herself or that
it serves Mrs B. right.
People who have never thought about the matter say that the honest way is
to let everyone have what she has the money to pay for, just as at present.
But that does not get us out of the difficulty. It only sets us asking how the
money is to be allotted. Money is only a bit of paper or a bit of metal that
gives its owner a lawful claim to so much bread or beer or diamonds or
motor-cars or what not. We cannot eat money, nor drink money, nor wear
money. It is the goods that money can buy that are being divided-up when
money is divided-up. Everything is reckoned in money; and when the law
gives Mrs B. her ten shillings when she is seventy years old and young
Master A. his three thousand shillings before he is seven minutes old, the
law is dividing-up the loaves and fishes, the clothes and houses, the motor-
cars and perambulators between them as if it were handing out these articles
directly instead of handing out the money that buys them.

4
NO WEALTH WITHOUT WORK

B
EFORE there can be any wealth to divide-up, there must be labor at
work. There can be no loaves without farmers and bakers. There are
a few little islands thousands of miles away where men and women
can lie basking in the sun and live on the cocoa-nuts the monkeys throw
down to them. But for us there is no such possibility. Without incessant
daily labor we should starve. If anyone is idle someone else must be
working for both or there would be nothing for either of them to eat. That
was why St Paul said “If a man will not work neither shall he eat”. The
burden of labor is imposed on us by Nature, and has to be divided-up as
well as the wealth it produces.
But the two divisions need not correspond to oneanother. One person can
produce much more than enough to feed herself. Otherwise the young
children could not be fed; and the old people who are past work would
starve. Many a woman with nothing to help her but her two hands has
brought up a family on her own earnings, and kept her aged parents into the
bargain, besides making rent for a ground landlord as well. And with the
help of water power, steam power, electric power, and modern machinery,
labor can be so organized that one woman can turn out more than a
thousand women could turn out 150 years ago.
This saving of labor by harnessing machines to natural forces, like wind and
water and the heat latent in coal, produces leisure, which also has to be
divided-up. If one person’s labor for ten hours can support ten persons for a
day, the ten can arrange in several different ways. They can put the ten
hours’ work on one person and let the other nine have all the leisure as well
as free rations. Or they can each do one hour’s work a day and each have
nine hours leisure. Or they can have anything between these extremes. They
can also arrange that three of them shall work ten hours a day each,
producing enough for thirty people, so that the other seven will not only
have nothing to do, but will be able to eat enough for fourteen and to keep

thirteen servants to wait on them and keep the three up to their work into
the bargain.
Another possible arrangement would be that they should all work much
longer every day than was necessary to keep them, on condition that they
were not required to work until they were fully grown and well educated,
and were allowed to stop working and amuse themselves for the rest of their
lives when they were fifty. Scores of different arrangements are possible
between out-and-out slavery and an equitable division of labor, leisure, and
wealth. Slavery, Serfdom, Feudalism, Capitalism, Socialism, Communism
are all at bottom different arrangements of this division. Revolutionary
history is the history of the effects of a continual struggle by persons and
classes to alter the arrangement in their own favor. But for the moment we
had better stick to the question of dividing-up the income the labor
produces; for the utmost difference you can make between one person and
another in respect of their labor or leisure is as nothing compared to the
enormous difference you can make in their incomes by modern methods
and machines. You cannot put more than 24 hours into a rich man’s day; but
you can put 24 million pounds into his pocket without asking him to lift his
little finger for it.

5
COMMUNISM

I
F I have made this clear to you, will you try to make up your mind how
you would like to see the income of your country divided-up day by
day? Do not run to the Socialists or the Capitalists, or to your favorite
newspaper, to make up your mind for you: they will only unsettle and
bewilder you when they are not intentionally misleading you. Think it out
for yourself. Conceive yourself as a national trustee with the entire income
of the country placed in your hands to be distributed so as to produce the
greatest social wellbeing for everybody in the country.
By the way, you had better leave your own share and that of your children
and relations and friends out of the question, lest your personal feelings
upset your judgment. Some women would say “I never think of anyone
else: I don’t know anyone else”. But that will never do in settling social
questions. Capitalism and Socialism are not schemes for distributing wealth
in one lady’s circle only, but for distributing wealth to everybody; and as
the quantity to be distributed every year is limited, if Mrs Dickson’s child,
or her sister’s child, or her dearest and oldest friend gets more, Mrs
Johnson’s child or sister’s child or dearest friend must get less. Mrs Dickson
must forget not only herself and her family and friends, but her class. She
must imagine herself for the moment a sort of angel acting for God, without
any earthly interests and affections to corrupt her integrity, concerned solely
with the task of deciding how much everybody should have out of the
national income for the sake of the world’s greatest possible welfare and the
greatest possible good of the world’s soul.
Of course I know that none of us can really do this; but we must get as near
it as we can. I know also that there are few things more irritating than the
glibness with which people tell us to think for ourselves when they know
quite well that our minds are mostly herd minds, with only a scrap of
individual mind on top. I am even prepared to be told that when you paid
the price of this book you were paying me to think for you. But I can no
more do that than I can eat your dinner for you. What I can do is to cook

your mental dinner for you by putting you in possession of the thinking that
has been done already on the subject by myself and others, so that you may
be saved the time and trouble and disappointment of trying to find your way
down blind alleys that have been thoroughly explored, and found to be no-
thoroughfares.
Here, then, are some plans that have been tried or proposed.
Let us begin with the simplest: the family plan of the apostles and their
followers. Among them everybody threw all that she or he had into a
common stock; and each took from it what she or he needed. The obligation
to do this was so sacred that when Ananias and Sapphira kept back
something for themselves, St Peter struck them dead for “lying to the Holy
Ghost”.
This plan, which is Communism in its primitive purity, is practised to this
day in small religious communities where the people live together and are
all known to one another. But it is not so simple for big populations where
the people do not live together and do not know each other. Even in the
family we practise it only partially; for though the father gives part of his
earnings to the mother, and the children do the same when they are earning
anything, and the mother buys food and places it before all of them to
partake in common, yet they all keep some of their earnings back for their
separate use; so that family life is not pure Communism, but partly
Communism and partly separate property. Each member of the family does
what Ananias and Sapphira did; but they need not tell lies about it (though
they sometimes do) because it is understood between them that the children
are to keep back something for pocket money, the father for beer and
tobacco, and the mother for her clothes if there is any left.
Besides, family Communism does not extend to the people next door. Every
house has its own separate meals; and the people in the other houses do not
contribute to it, and have no right to share it. There are, however, exceptions
to this in modern cities. Though each family buys its own beer separately,
they all get their water communistically. They pay what they call a water
rate into a common fund to pay for a constant supply to every house; and
they all draw as much or as little water as they need.
In the same way they pay for the lighting of the streets, for paving them, for
policemen to patrol them, for bridges across the rivers, and for the removal

and destruction of dustbin refuse. Nobody thinks of saying “I never go out
after dark; I have never called a policeman in my life; I have no business on
the other side of the river and never cross the bridge; and therefore I will
not help to pay the cost of these things”. Everybody knows that town life
could not exist without lighting and paving and bridges and police and
sanitation, and that a bedridden invalid who never leaves the house, or a
blind man whose darkness no street lamp can dispel, is as dependent on
these public services for daily supplies of food and for safety and health as
any healthy person. And this is as true of the army and navy as of the police
force, of a lighthouse as of a street lamp, of a Town Hall as of the Houses of
Parliament: they are all paid for out of the common stock made up by our
rates and taxes; and they are for the benefit of everybody indiscriminately.
In short, they are Communistic.
When we pay our rates to keep up this Communism we do not, like the
apostles, throw all we have into the common stock: we make a contribution
according to our means; and our means are judged by the value of the house
we live in. But those who pay low contributions have just the same use of
the public services as those who pay high ones; and strangers and vagrants
who do not pay any contributions at all enjoy them equally. Young and old,
prince and pauper, virtuous and vicious, black and white and yellow, thrifty
and wasteful, drunk and sober, tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor
man, beggarman and thief, all have the same use and enjoyment of these
communistic conveniences and services which cost so much to keep up.
And it works perfectly. Nobody dreams of proposing that people should not
be allowed to walk down the street without paying and producing a
certificate of character from two respectable householders. Yet the street
costs more than any of the places you pay to go into, such as theatres, or
any of the places where you have to be introduced, like clubs.

6
LIMITS TO COMMUNISM

W
OULD you ever have supposed from reading the newspapers that
Communism, instead of being a wicked invention of Russian
revolutionaries and British and American desperadoes, is a highly
respectable way of sharing our wealth, sanctioned and practised by the
apostles, and an indispensable part of our own daily life and civilization?
The more Communism, the more civilization. We could not get on without
it, and are continually extending it. We could give up some of it if we liked.
We could put turnpike gates on the roads and make everybody pay for
passing along them: indeed we may still see the little toll houses where the
old turnpike gates used to be. We could abolish the street lamps, and hire
men with torches to light us through the streets at night: are not the
extinguishers formerly used by hired linkmen still to be seen on old-
fashioned railings? We could even hire policemen and soldiers by the job to
protect us, and then disband the police force and the army. But we take
good care to do nothing of the sort. In spite of the way people grumble
about their rates and taxes they get better value for them than for all the
other money they spend. To find a bridge built for us to cross the river
without having to think about it or pay anyone for it is such a matter of
course to us that some of us come to think, like the children, that bridges are
provided by nature, and cost nothing. But if the bridges were allowed to fall
down, and we had to find out for ourselves how to cross the river by fording
it or swimming it or hiring a boat, we should soon realize what a blessed
thing Communism is, and not grudge the few shillings that each of us has to
pay the rate collector for the upkeep of the bridge. In fact we might come to
think Communism such a splendid thing that everything ought to be
communized.
But this would not work. The reason a bridge can be communized is that
everyone either uses the bridge or benefits by it. It may be taken as a rule
that whatever is used by everybody or benefits everybody can be
communized. Roads, bridges, street lighting, and water supply are
communized as a matter of course in cities, though in villages and country

places people have to buy and carry lanterns on dark nights and get their
water from their own wells. There is no reason why bread should not be
communized: it would be an inestimable benefit to everybody if there were
no such thing in the country as a hungry child, and no housekeeper had to
think of the cost of providing bread for the household. Railways could be
communized. You can amuse yourself by thinking of lots of other services
that would benefit everyone, and therefore could and should be
communized.
Only, you will be stopped when you come to services that are not useful to
everyone. We communize water as a matter of course; but what about beer?
What would a teetotaller say if he were asked to pay rates or taxes to enable
his neighbors to have as much beer as they want for the asking? He would
have a double objection: first, that he would be paying for something he
does not use; and second, that in his opinion beer, far from being a good
thing, causes ill-health, crime, drunkenness, and so forth. He would go to
prison rather than pay rates for such a purpose.
The most striking example of this difficulty is the Church. The Church of
England is a great communistic institution: its property is held in trust for
God; its temples and services are open to everybody; and its bishops sit in
Parliament as peers of the realm. Yet, because we are not all agreed as to the
doctrines of the Church of England, and many of us think that a communion
table with candles on it is too like a Roman Catholic altar, we have been
forced to make the Church rate a voluntary one: that is, you may pay it or
not as you please. And when the Education Act of 1902 gave some public
money to Church schools, many people refused to pay their rates, and
allowed their furniture to be sold year after year, sooner than allow a penny
of theirs to go to the Church. Thus you see that if you propose to
communize something that is not used or at least approved of by everybody,
you will be asking for trouble. We all use roads and bridges, and agree that
they are useful and necessary things; but we differ about religion and
temperance and playgoing, and quarrel fiercely over our differences. That is
why we communize roads and bridges without any complaint or refusal to
pay rates, but have masses of voters against us at once when we attempt to
communize any particular form of public worship, or to deal with beer or
spirits as we deal with water, and as we should deal with milk if we had
sense enough to value the nation’s health.

This difficulty can be got round to some extent by give-and-take between
the people who want different things. For instance, there are some people
who care for flowers and do not care for music, and others who care for
games and boating and care neither for flowers nor music. But these
differently minded people do not object to paying rates for the upkeep of a
public park with flower-beds, cricket pitches, a lake for boating and
swimming, and a band. Laura will not object to pay for what Beatrice wants
if Beatrice does not object to pay for what Laura wants.
Also there are many things that only a few people understand or use which
nevertheless everybody pays for because without them we should have no
learning, no books, no pictures, no high civilization. We have public
galleries of the best pictures and statues, public libraries of the best books,
public observatories in which astronomers watch the stars and
mathematicians make abstruse calculations, public laboratories in which
scientific men are supposed to add to our knowledge of the universe. These
institutions cost a great deal of money to which we all have to contribute.
Many of us never enter a gallery or a museum or a library even when we
live within easy reach of them; and not one person in ten is interested in
astronomy or mathematics or physical science; but we all have a general
notion that these things are necessary; and so we do not object to pay for
them.
Besides, many of us do not know that we pay for them: we think we get
them as kind presents from somebody. In this way a good deal of
Communism has been established without our knowing anything about it.
This is shewn by our way of speaking about communized things as free.
Because we can enter the National Gallery or the British Museum or the
cathedrals without paying at the doors, some of us seem to think that they
grew by the roadside like wildflowers. But they cost us a great deal of
money from week to week. The British Museum has to be swept and dusted
and scrubbed more than any private house, because so many more people
tramp through it with mud on their boots. The salaries of the learned
gentlemen who are in charge of it are a trifle compared with the cost of
keeping it tidy. In the same way a public park needs more gardeners than a
private one, and has to be weeded and mown and watered and sown and so
forth at a great cost in wages and seeds and garden implements. We get
nothing for nothing; and if we do not pay every time we go into these

places, we pay in rates and taxes. The poorest tramp, though he may escape
rent and rates by sleeping out, pays whenever he buys tobacco, because he
pays about eight times as much for the tobacco as it costs to grow and put
on the market; and the Government gets the difference to spend on public
purposes: that is, to maintain Communism. And the poorest woman pays in
the same way, without knowing it, whenever she buys an article of food that
is taxed. If she knew that she was stinting herself to pay the salary of the
Astronomer Royal, or to buy another picture for the National Gallery, she
might vote against the Government at the next election for making her do it;
but as she does not know, she only grumbles about the high prices of food,
and thinks they are all due to bad harvests or hard times or strikes or
anything else that must be put up with. She might not grudge what she has
to pay for the King and Queen; but if she knew that she was paying the
wages of the thousands of charwomen who scrub the stone staircases in the
Houses of Parliament and other great public buildings, she would not get
much satisfaction out of helping to support them better than she can afford
to support herself.
We see then that some of the Communism we practise is imposed on us
without our consent: we pay for it without knowing what we are doing. But,
in the main, Communism deals with things that are either used by all of us
or necessary to all of us, whether we are educated enough to understand the
necessity or not.
Now let us get back to the things as to which tastes differ. We have already
seen that Church of England services and beer and wine and spirits and
intoxicants of all sorts are considered necessary to life by some people, and
pernicious and poisonous by others. We are not agreed even about tea and
meat. But there are many things that no one sees any harm in; yet
everybody does not want them. Ask a woman what little present she would
like; and one woman will choose a pet dog, another a gramophone. A
studious girl will ask for a microscope when an active girl will ask for a
motor bicycle. Indoor people want books and pictures and pianos: outdoor
people want guns and fishing-rods and horses and motor cars. To
communize these things in the way that we communize roads and bridges
would be ridiculously wasteful. If you made enough gramophones and bred
enough pet dogs to supply every woman with both, or enough microscopes
and motor bicycles to provide one each for every girl, you would have

heaps of them left on your hands by the women and girls who did not want
them and would not find house room for them. They could not even sell
them, because everybody who wanted one would have one already. They
would go into the dustbin.
There is only one way out of this difficulty. Instead of giving people things
you must give them money and let them buy what they like with it. Instead
of giving Mrs Smith, who wants a gramophone, a gramophone and a pet
dog as well, costing, say, five pounds apiece, and giving Mrs Jones, who
wants a pet dog, a pet dog and a gramophone as well, with the certainty that
Mrs Smith will drive her pet dog out of her house and Mrs Jones will throw
her gramophone into the dustbin, so that the ten pounds they cost will be
wasted, you can simply give Mrs Smith and Mrs Jones five pounds apiece.
Then Mrs Smith buys a gramophone; Mrs Jones buys a pet dog; and both
live happily ever after. And, of course, you will take care not to
manufacture more gramophones or breed more dogs than are needed to
satisfy them.
That is the use of money: it enables us to get what we want instead of what
other people think we want. When a young lady is married, her friends give
her wedding presents instead of giving her money; and the consequence is
that she finds herself loaded up with six fish-slices, seven or eight travelling
clocks, and not a single pair of silk stockings. If her friends had the sense to
give her money (I always do), and she had the sense to take it (she always
does), she would have one fish-slice, one travelling clock (if she wanted
such a thing), and plenty of stockings. Money is the most convenient thing
in the world: we could not possibly do without it. We are told that the love
of money is the root of all evil; but money itself is one of the most useful
contrivances ever invented: it is not its fault that some people are foolish or
miserly enough to be fonder of it than of their own souls.
You now see that the great dividing-up of things that has to take place year
by year, quarter by quarter, month by month, week by week, day by day,
hour by hour, and even minute by minute, though some of it can be done by
the ancient simple family communism of the apostles, or by the modern
ratepayers’ communism of the roads and bridges and street lamps and so
forth, must in the main take the form of a dividing-up of money. And as this
throws you back again on the old questions: how much is each of us to
have? what is my fair share? what is your fair share? and why?

Communism has only partly solved the problem for you; so we must have
another shot at it.

7
SEVEN WAYS PROPOSED

A
PLAN which has often been proposed, and which seems very
plausible to the working classes, is to let every person have that part
of the wealth of the country which she has herself produced by her
work (the feminine pronoun here includes the masculine). Others say let us
all get what we deserve; so that the idle and dissolute and weak shall have
nothing and perish, and the good and industrious and energetic shall have
all and survive. Some believe in “the good old rule, the simple plan, that
they shall take who have the power, and they shall keep who can”, though
they seldom confess it nowadays. Some say let the common people get
enough to keep them alive in that state of life to which it has pleased God to
call them; and let the gentry take the rest, though that, too, is not now said
so openly as it was in the eighteenth century. Some say let us divide
ourselves into classes; and let the division be equal in each class though
unequal between the classes; so that laborers shall get thirty shillings a
week, skilled workers three or four pounds, bishops two thousand five
hundred a year, judges five thousand, archbishops fifteen thousand, and
their wives what they can get out of them. Others say simply let us go on as
we are.
What the Socialists say is that none of these plans will work well, and that
the only satisfactory plan is to give everybody an equal share no matter
what sort of person she is, or how old she is, or what sort of work she does,
or who or what her father was.
If this, or any of the other plans, happens to startle and scandalize you,
please do not blame me or throw my book into the fire. I am only telling
you the different plans that have been proposed and to some extent actually
tried. You are not bound to approve of any of them; and you are quite free
to propose a better plan than any of them if you can think one out. But you
are not free to dismiss it from your mind as none of your business. It is a
question of your food and lodging, and therefore part of your life. If you do
not settle it for yourself, the people who are encouraging you to neglect it

will settle it for you; and you may depend on it they will take care of their
own shares and not of yours, in which case you may find yourself some day
without any share at all.
I have seen that happen very cruelly during my own lifetime. In the country
where I was born, which is within an hour’s run of England at the nearest
point, many ladies of high social standing and gentle breeding, who thought
that this question did not concern them because they were well off for the
moment, ended very pitiably in the workhouse. They felt that bitterly, and
hated those who had brought it about; but they never understood why it
happened. Had they understood from the beginning how and why it might
happen, they might have averted it, instead of, as they did, doing everything
in their power to hasten their own ruin.
You may very easily share their fate unless you take care to understand
what is happening. The world is changing very quickly, as it was around
them when they thought it as fixed as the mountains. It is changing much
more quickly around you; and I promise you that if you will be patient
enough to finish this book (think of all the patience it has cost me to finish
it instead of writing plays!) you will come out with much more knowledge
of how things are changing, and what your risks and prospects are, than you
are likely to have learnt from your schoolbooks.
Therefore I am going to take all these plans for you one after another, and
examine them chapter by chapter until you know pretty well all that is to be
said for and against them.

8
TO EACH WHAT SHE PRODUCES

T
HE first plan: that of giving to every person exactly what he or she
has made by his or her labor, seems fair; but when we try to put it into
practice we discover, first, that it is quite impossible to find out how
much each person has produced, and, second, that a great deal of the
world’s work is neither producing material things nor altering the things
that Nature produces, but doing services of one sort or another.
When a farmer and his laborers sow and reap a field of wheat nobody on
earth can say how much of the wheat each of them has grown. When a
machine in a factory turns out pins by the million nobody can say how
many pins are due to the labor of the person who minds the machine, or the
person who invented it, or the engineers who made it, to say nothing of all
the other persons employed about the factory. The clearest case in the world
of a person producing something herself by her own painful, prolonged, and
risky labor is that of a woman who produces a baby; but then she cannot
live on the baby: the baby lives greedily on her.
Robinson Crusoe on his desert island could have claimed that the boats and
shelters and fences he made with the materials supplied by Nature belonged
to him because they were the fruit of nobody’s labor but his own; but when
he returned to civilization he could not have laid his hand on a chair or table
in his house which was not the work of dozens of men: foresters who had
planted the trees, woodmen who had felled them, lumbermen and bargemen
and sailors and porters who had moved them, sawyers who had sawn them
into planks and scantlings, upholsterers and joiners who had fashioned them
into tables and chairs, not to mention the merchants who had conducted all
the business involved in these transactions, and the makers of the shops and
ships and all the rest of it. Anyone who thinks about it for a few minutes
must see that trying to divide-up by giving each worker exactly what she or
he has produced is like trying to give every drop of rain in a heavy shower
exactly the quantity of water it adds to the supply in your cistern. It just
cannot be done.

What can be done is to pay every person according to the time she or he
spends at the work. Time is something that can be measured in figures. It is
quite easy to pay a worker twice as much for two hours work as for one.
There are people who will work for sixpence an hour, people who will work
for eighteenpence an hour, people who will work for two guineas an hour,
people who will work for a hundred and fifty guineas an hour. These prices
depend on how many competitors there are in the trade looking for the
work, and whether the people who want it done are rich or poor. You pay a
sempstress a shilling to sew for an hour, or a laborer to chop wood, when
there are plenty of unemployed sempstresses and laborers starving for a job,
each of them trying to induce you to give it to her or him rather than to the
next applicant by offering to do it at a price that will barely keep body and
soul together. You pay a popular actress two or three hundred pounds a
week, or a famous opera singer as much a night, because the public will pay
more than that to hear her. You pay a famous surgeon a hundred and fifty
guineas to cut out your appendix, or a famous barrister the same to plead for
you, because there are so few famous surgeons or barristers, and so many
patients and clients offering them large sums to work for them rather than
for you. This is called settling the price of a worker’s time, or rather letting
it settle itself, by supply and demand.
Unfortunately, supply and demand may produce undesirable results. A
division in which one woman gets a shilling and another three thousand
shillings for an hour of work has no moral sense in it: it is just something
that happens, and that ought not to happen. A child with an interesting face
and pretty ways, and some talent for acting, may, by working for the films,
earn a hundred times as much as its mother can earn by drudging at an
ordinary trade. What is worse, a pretty girl can earn by vice far more than
her plain sister can earn as an honest wife and mother.
Besides, it is not so easy to measure the time spent on a piece of work as it
seems at first. Paying a laborer twice as much for two hours work as for one
is as simple as twice one are two; but when you have to divide between an
opera singer and her dresser, or an unskilled laborer and a doctor, you find
that you cannot tell how much time you have to allow for. The dresser and
the laborer are doing what any ablebodied person can do without long study
or apprenticeship. The doctor has to spend six years in study and training,
on top of a good general education, to qualify himself to do his work. He

claims that six years of unpaid work are behind every minute of his
attendance at your bedside. A skilled workman may claim in the same way
that seven years of apprenticeship are behind every stroke of his hammer.
The opera singer has had to spend a long time learning her parts, even
when, as sometimes happens, she has never learnt to sing. Everybody
acknowledges that this makes a difference; but nobody can measure exactly
what the difference is, either in time or money.
The same difficulty arises in attempting to compare the value of the work of
a clever woman with that of a stupid one. You may think that the work of
the clever woman is worth more; but when you are asked how much more
in pounds, shillings, and pence you have to give it up and fall back on
supply and demand, confessing that the difference cannot be measured in
money.
In these examples I have mixed up making things with doing services; but I
must now emphasize this distinction, because thoughtless people are apt to
think a brickmaker more of a producer than a clergyman. When a village
carpenter makes a gate to keep cattle out of a field of wheat, he has
something solid in his hand which he can claim for his own until the farmer
pays him for it. But when a village boy makes a noise to keep the birds off
he has nothing to shew, though the noise is just as necessary as the gate.
The postman does not make anything: he only delivers letters and parcels.
The policeman does not make anything; and the soldier not only does not
make things: he destroys them. The doctor makes pills sometimes; but that
is not his real business, which is to tell you when you ought to take pills,
and what pills to take, unless indeed he has the good sense to tell you not to
take them at all, and you have the good sense to believe him when he is
giving you good advice instead of bad. The lawyer does not make anything
substantial, nor the clergyman, nor the member of Parliament, nor the
domestic servant (though she sometimes breaks things), nor the Queen or
King, nor an actor. When their work is done they have nothing in hand that
can be weighed or measured: nothing that the maker can keep from others
until she is paid for it. They are all in service: in domestic service like the
housemaid, or in commercial service like the shop assistant, or in
Government service like the postman, or in State service like the King; and
all of us who have fullsize consciences consider ourselves in what some of
us call the service of God.

And then, beside the persons who make the substantial things there must be
persons to find out how they should be made. Beside the persons who do
things there must be persons who know how they should be done, and
decide when they should be done, and how much they should be done. In
simple village life both the making or the doing and the thinking may be
done by the same person when he is a blacksmith, carpenter, or builder; but
in big cities and highly civilized countries this is impossible: one set of
people has to make and do whilst another set of people thinks and decides
what, when, how much, and by whom.
Our villages would be improved by a little of this division of labor; for it is
a great disadvantage in country life that a farmer is expected to do so many
different things: he has not only to grow crops and raise stock (two separate
arts to begin with, and difficult ones too), but to be a man of business,
keeping complicated accounts and selling his crops and his cattle, which is
a different sort of job, needing a different sort of man. And, as if this were
not enough, he has to keep his dwelling house as part of his business; so
that he is expected to be a professional man, a man of business, and a sort
of country gentleman all at once; and the consequence is that farming is all
a muddle: the good farmer is poor because he is a bad man of business; the
good man of business is poor because he is a bad farmer; and both of them
are often bad husbands because their work is not separate from their home,
and they bring all their worries into the house with them instead of locking
them up in a city office and thinking no more about them until they go back
there next morning. In a city business one set of men does the manual work;
another set keeps the accounts; another chooses the markets for buying and
selling; and all of them leave their work behind them when they go home.
The same trouble is found in a woman’s housekeeping. She is expected to
do too many different things. She may be a very good housekeeper and a
very bad cook. In a French town this would not matter, because the whole
family would take all the meals that require any serious cooking in the
nearest restaurant; but in the country the woman must do both the
housekeeping and the cooking unless she can afford to keep a cook. She
may be both a good housekeeper and a good cook, but be unable to manage
children; and here again, if she cannot afford a capable nurse, she has to do
the thing she does badly along with the things she does well, and has her
life muddled and spoilt accordingly. It is a mercy both to her and the

children that the school (which is a bit of Communism) takes them off her
hands for most of the day. It is clear that the woman who is helped out by
servants or by restaurants and schools has a much better chance in life than
the woman who is expected to do three very different things at once.
Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the
country and to mankind is to bring up a family. But here again, because
there is nothing to sell, there is a very general disposition to regard a
married woman’s work as no work at all, and to take it as a matter of course
that she should not be paid for it. A man gets higher wages than a woman
because he is supposed to have a family to support; yet if he spends the
extra money in drink or betting, the woman has no remedy against him if
she is married to him. But if she is his hired housekeeper she can recover
her wages at law. And the married man is in the same predicament. When
his wife spends the housekeeping money in drink he has no remedy, though
he could have a hired housekeeper imprisoned for theft if she did the very
same thing.
Now with these examples in mind, how can an Intelligent Woman settle
what her time is worth in money compared to her husband’s? Imagine her
husband looking at it as a matter of business, and saying “I can hire a
housekeeper for so much, and a nursemaid for so much, and a cook for so
much, and a pretty lady to keep company with for so much; and if I add up
all this the total will be what a wife is worth; but it is more than I can afford
to pay”! Imagine her hiring a husband by the hour, like a taxi cab!
Yet the income of the country has to be divided-up between husbands and
wives just as it has between strangers; and as most of us are husbands and
wives, any plan for dividing-up that breaks down when it is applied to
husbands and wives breaks in the middle and is no use. The old plan of
giving the man everything, and leaving the woman to get what she could
out of him, led to such abuses that it had to be altered by the Married
Women’s Property Acts, under which a rich woman with a poor husband
can keep all her property to herself whilst her husband is imprisoned for life
for not paying her taxes. But as nine families out of ten have no property,
they have to make the best of what the husband can earn at his trade; and
here we have the strangest muddles: the wife getting nothing of her own,
and the bigger children making a few shillings a week and having the
difference between it and a living wage made up by the father’s wage; so

that the people who are employing the children cheaply are really sweating
the father, who is perhaps being sweated badly enough by his own
employer. Of this, more later on.
Try to straighten out this muddle on the plan of giving the woman and the
children and the man what they produce each by their own work, or what
their time is worth in money to the country; and you will find the plan
nonsensical and impossible. Nobody but a lunatic would attempt to put it
into practice.

9
TO EACH WHAT SHE DESERVES

T
HE second plan we have to examine is that of giving to each person
what she deserves. Many people, especially those who are
comfortably off, think that this is what happens at present: that the
industrious and sober and thrifty are never in want, and that poverty is due
to idleness, improvidence, drink, betting, dishonesty, and bad character
generally. They can point to the fact that a laborer whose character is bad
finds it more difficult to get employment than one whose character is good;
that a farmer or country gentleman who gambles and bets heavily, and
mortgages his land to live wastefully and extravagantly, is soon reduced to
poverty; and that a man of business who is lazy and does not attend to it
becomes bankrupt. But this proves nothing but that you cannot eat your
cake and have it too: it does not prove that your share of the cake was a fair
one. It shews that certain vices and weaknesses make us poor; but it forgets
that certain other vices make us rich. People who are hard, grasping, selfish,
cruel, and always ready to take advantage of their neighbors, become very
rich if they are clever enough not to overreach themselves. On the other
hand, people who are generous, public-spirited, friendly, and not always
thinking of the main chance, stay poor when they are born poor unless they
have extraordinary talents. Also, as things are today, some are born poor
and others are born with silver spoons in their mouths: that is to say, they
are divided into rich and poor before they are old enough to have any
character at all. The notion that our present system distributes wealth
according to merit, even roughly, may be dismissed at once as ridiculous.
Everyone can see that it generally has the contrary effect: it makes a few
idle people very rich, and a great many hardworking people very poor.
On this, Intelligent Lady, your first thought may be that if wealth is not
distributed according to merit, it ought to be; and that we should at once set
to work to alter our laws so that in future the good people shall be rich in
proportion to their goodness and the bad people poor in proportion to their
badness. There are several objections to this; but the very first one settles
the question for good and all. It is, that the proposal is impossible. How are

you going to measure anyone’s merit in money? Choose any pair of human
beings you like, male or female, and see whether you can decide how much
each of them should have on her or his merits. If you live in the country,
take the village blacksmith and the village clergyman, or the village
washerwoman and the village schoolmistress, to begin with. At present the
clergyman often gets less pay than the blacksmith: it is only in some
villages he gets more. But never mind what they get at present: you are
trying whether you can set up a new order of things in which each will get
what he deserves. You need not fix a sum of money for them: all you have
to do is to settle the proportion between them. Is the blacksmith to have as
much as the clergyman? or twice as much as the clergyman? or half as
much as the clergyman? or how much more or less? It is no use saying that
one ought to have more and the other less: you must be prepared to say
exactly how much more or less in calculable proportion.
Well, think it out. The clergyman has had a college education; but that is not
any merit on his part: he owes it to his father; so you cannot allow him
anything for that. But through it he is able to read the New Testament in
Greek; so that he can do something the blacksmith cannot do. On the other
hand, the blacksmith can make a horse-shoe, which the parson cannot. How
many verses of the Greek Testament are worth one horse-shoe? You have
only to ask the silly question to see that nobody can answer it.
Since measuring their merits is no use, why not try to measure their faults?
Suppose the blacksmith swears a good deal, and gets drunk occasionally!
Everybody in the village knows this; but the parson has to keep his faults to
himself. His wife knows them; but she will not tell you what they are if she
knows that you intend to cut off some of his pay for them. You know that as
he is only a mortal human being he must have some faults; but you cannot
find them out. However, suppose he has some faults that you can find out!
Suppose he has what you call an unfortunate manner; that he is a hypocrite;
that he is a snob; that he cares more for sport and fashionable society than
for religion! Does that make him as bad as the blacksmith, or twice as bad,
or twice and a quarter as bad, or only half as bad? In other words, if the
blacksmith is to have a shilling, is the parson to have a shilling also, or is he
to have sixpence, or fivepence and one-third, or two shillings? Clearly these
are fools’ questions: the moment they bring us down from moral
generalities to business particulars it becomes plain to every sensible person

that no relation can be established between human qualities, good or bad,
and sums of money, large or small. It may seem scandalous that a prize-
fighter, for hitting another prize-fighter so hard at Wembley that he fell
down and could not rise within ten seconds, received the same sum that was
paid to the Archbishop of Canterbury for acting as Primate of the Church of
England for nine months; but none of those who cry out against the scandal
can express any better in money the difference between the two. Not one of
the persons who think that the prize-fighter should get less than the
Archbishop can say how much less. What the prize-fighter got for his six or
seven minutes boxing would pay a judge’s salary for two years; and we are
all agreed that nothing could be more ridiculous, and that any system of
distributing wealth which leads to such absurdities must be wrong. But to
suppose that it could be changed by any possible calculation that an ounce
of archbishop or three ounces of judge is worth a pound of prize-fighter
would be sillier still. You can find out how many candles are worth a pound
of butter in the market on any particular day; but when you try to estimate
the worth of human souls the utmost you can say is that they are all of equal
value before the throne of God. And that will not help you in the least to
settle how much money they should have. You must simply give it up, and
admit that distributing money according to merit is beyond mortal
measurement and judgment.

10
TO EACH WHAT SHE CAN GRAB

T
HE third plan: that of letting everyone have what she can lay her
hands on, would produce a world in which there would be no peace
and no security. If we were all equally strong and cunning we should
all have an equal chance; but in a world where there are children and old
people and invalids, and where able-bodied adults of the same age and
strength vary greatly in greediness and wickedness, it would never do: we
should get tired of it in no time. Even pirate crews and bands of robbers
prefer a peaceful settled understanding as to the division of their plunder to
the Kilkenny cat plan.
Among ourselves, though robbery and violence are forbidden, we still allow
business to be conducted on the principle of letting everyone make what he
can out of it without considering anyone but himself. A shopkeeper or a
coal merchant may not pick your pocket; but he may overcharge you as
much as he likes. Everyone is free in business to get as much and give as
little for his money as he can induce his customers to put up with. House
rent can be raised without any regard to the cost of the houses or the
poverty of the tenant. But this freedom produces such bad results that new
laws are continually being made to restrain it; and even when it is a
necessary part of our freedom to spend our money and use our possessions
as seems best to us, we still have to settle how much money and what
possessions we should be given to start with. This distribution must be
made according to some law or other. Anarchy (absence of law) will not
work. We must go on with our search for a righteous and practicable law.

11
OLIGARCHY

T
HE fourth plan is to take one person in every ten (say), and make her
rich without working by making the other nine work hard and long
every day, giving them only enough of what they make to keep them
alive and enable them to bring up families to continue their slavery when
they grow old and die. This is roughly what happens at present, as one-tenth
of the English people own nine-tenths of all the property in the country,
whilst most of the other nine-tenths have no property, and live from week to
week on wages barely sufficient to support them in a very poor way. The
advantage claimed for this plan is that it provides us with a gentry: that is,
with a class of rich people able to cultivate themselves by an expensive
education; so that they become qualified to govern the country and make
and maintain its laws; to organize and officer the army for national defence;
to patronize and keep alive learning, science, art, literature, philosophy,
religion, and all the institutions that distinguish great civilizations from
mere groups of villages; to raise magnificent buildings, dress splendidly,
impose awe on the unruly, and set an example of good manners and fine
living. Most important of all, as men of business think, by giving them
much more than they need spend, we enable them to save those great sums
of spare money that are called capital, and are spent in making railways,
mines, factories full of machinery, and all the other contrivances by which
wealth is produced in great quantities.
This plan, which is called Oligarchy, is the old English plan of dividing us
into gentry living by property and common people living by work: the plan
of the few rich and the many poor. It has worked for a long time, and is still
working. And it is evident that if the incomes of the rich were taken from
them and divided among the poor as we stand at present, the poor would be
only very little less poor; the supply of capital would cease because nobody
could afford to save; the country houses would fall into ruins; and learning
and science and art and literature and all the rest of what we call culture
would perish. That is why so many people support the present system, and
stand by the gentry although they themselves are poor. They see that if ten

women can produce only £110 a year each by their labor, it may be wiser
for nine of them to be content with £50 apiece, and make the other one an
educated lady, mistress, and ruler by giving her £500 a year without any
obligation to work at all, or any inducement to work except the hope of
finding how to make their work more fruitful for her own benefit, rather
than to insist on having £110 a year each. Though we make this sort of
arrangement at present because we are forced to, and indeed mostly without
knowing that we are making it, yet it is conceivable that if we understood
what we were doing and were free to carry it out or not as we thought best,
we might still do it for the sake of having a gentry to keep up finer things in
the world than a miserable crowd all equally poor, and all tied to primitive
manual labor.
But the abuses that arise from this plan are so terrible that the world is
becoming set against it. If we decide to go on with it, the first step is to
settle who is to be the tenth person: the lady. How is that to be decided?
True, we could begin by drawing lots; and after that the gentry could
intermarry and be succeeded by their firstborns. But the mischief of it is
that when we at last got our gentry established we should have no guarantee
that they would do any of the things we intended them to do and paid them
to do. With the best intentions, the gentry govern the country very badly
because they are so far removed from the common people that they do not
understand their needs. They use their power to make themselves still richer
by forcing the common people to work still harder and accept still less.
They spend enormous sums on sport and entertainment, gluttony and
ostentation, and very little on science and art and learning. They produce
poverty on a vast scale by withdrawing labor from production to waste it in
superfluous menial service. They either shirk military duties or turn the
army into a fashionable retinue for themselves and an instrument of
oppression at home and conquest abroad. They corrupt the teaching in the
universities and schools to glorify themselves and hide their misdeeds. They
do the same with the Church. They try to keep the common people poor and
ignorant and servile so as to make themselves more indispensable. At last
their duties have to be taken out of their hands and discharged by
Parliament, by the Civil Service, by the War Office and the Admiralty, by
city corporations, by Poor Law Guardians, by County and Parish and
District Councils, by salaried servants and Boards of paid directors, by

societies and institutions of all kinds depending on taxation or on public
subscription.
When this occurs, as it actually has occurred, all the cultural and political
reasons for the maintenance of a gentry vanish. It always does occur when
city life grows up and takes the place of country life. When a peeress
resides on her estates in a part of the country where life is still very simple,
and the nearest thing to a town is a village ten miles from the railway
station, the people look to her ladyship for everything that is not produced
by their daily toil. She represents all the splendor and greatness and
romance of civilization, and does a good deal for them which they would
not know how to do for themselves. In this way a Highland clan, before
Scotland became civilized, always had a chief. The clansmen willingly gave
him the lion’s share of such land and goods as they could come by, or of the
plunder they took in their raids. They did this because they could not fight
successfully without a leader, and could not live together without a
lawgiver. Their chief was to them what Moses was to the Israelites in the
desert. The Highland chief was practically a king in his clan, just as the
peeress is a queen on her estates. Loyalty to him was instinctive.
But when a Highland chief walked into a city he had less power than the
first police constable he met: in fact it sometimes happened that the police
constable took him in charge, and the city authorities hanged him. When the
peeress leaves her estate and goes up to London for the season, she
becomes a nobody except to her personal acquaintances. Everything that
she does for her people in the country is done in London by paid public
servants of all sorts; and when she leaves the country and settles in America
or on the Continent to evade British income tax she is not missed in
London: everything goes on just as before. But her tenants, who have to
earn the money she spends abroad, get nothing by her, and revile her as a
fugitive and an Absentee.
Small wonder then that Oligarchy is no longer consented to willingly. A
great deal of the money the oligarchs get is now taken back from them by
taxation and death duties; so that the old families are being reduced very
rapidly to the level of ordinary citizens; and when their estates are gone, as
they will be after a few generations more of our present heavy death duties,
their titles will only make their poverty ridiculous. Already many of their
most famous country houses are occupied either by rich business families of

quite ordinary quality, or by Co-operative Societies as Convalescent Homes
or places for conference and recreation, or as hotels or schools or lunatic
asylums.
You must therefore face the fact that in a civilization like ours, where most
of the population lives in cities; where railways, motor cars, posts,
telegraphs, telephones, gramophones and radio have brought city ways and
city culture into the country; and where even the smallest village has its
parish meeting and its communal policeman, the old reasons for making a
few people very rich whilst all the others work hard for a bare subsistence
have passed away. The plan no longer works, even in the Highlands.
Still, there is one reason left for maintaining a class of excessively rich
people at the expense of the rest; and business men consider it the strongest
reason of all. That reason is that it provides capital by giving some people
more money than they can easily spend; so that they can save money
(capital is saved money) without any privation. The argument is that if
income were more equally distributed, we should all have so little that we
should spend all our incomes, and nothing would be saved to make
machinery and build factories and construct railways and dig mines and so
forth. Now it is certainly necessary to high civilization that these savings
should be made; but it would be hard to imagine a more wasteful way of
bringing it about.
To begin with, it is very important that there should be no saving until there
has been sufficient spending: spending comes first. A nation which makes
steam engines before its little children have enough milk to make their legs
strong enough to carry them is making a fool’s choice. Yet this is just what
we do by this plan of making a few rich and the masses poor. Again, even if
we put the steam engine before the milk, our plan gives us no security that
we shall get the steam engine, or, if we get it, that it will be set up in our
country. Just as a great deal of the money that was given to the country
gentlemen of England on the chance of their encouraging art and science
was spent by them on cock-fighting and horse-racing; so a shocking
proportion of the money we give our oligarchs on the chance of their
investing it as capital is spent by them in self-indulgence. Of the very rich it
may be said that they do not begin to save until they can spend no more,
and that they are continually inventing new and expensive extravagances
that would have been impossible a hundred years ago. When their income

outruns their extravagance so far that they must use it as capital or throw it
away, there is nothing to prevent them investing it in South America, in
South Africa, in Russia, or in China, though we cannot get our own slums
cleaned up for want of capital kept in and applied to our own country.
Hundreds of millions of pounds are sent abroad every year in this way; and
we complain of the competition of foreigners whilst we allow our capitalists
to provide them at our expense with the very machinery with which they are
taking our industries from us.
Of course the capitalists plead that we are none the poorer, because the
interest on their capital comes back into this country from the countries in
which they have invested it; and as they invest it abroad only because they
get more interest abroad than at home, they assure us that we are actually
the richer for their export of capital, because it enables them to spend more
at home and thus give British workers more employment. But we have no
guarantee that they will spend it at home: they are as likely to spend it in
Monte Carlo, Madeira, Egypt, or where not? And when they do spend it at
home and give us employment, we have to ask what sort of employment?
When our farms and mills and cloth factories are all ruined by our
importing our food and cloth from abroad instead of making them
ourselves, it is not enough for our capitalists to shew us that instead of the
farms we have the best golf courses in the world; instead of mills and
factories splendid hotels; instead of engineers and shipwrights and bakers
and carpenters and weavers, waiters and chambermaids, valets and ladies’
maids, gamekeepers and butlers and so forth, all better paid and more
elegantly dressed than the productive workers they have replaced. We have
to consider what sort of position we shall be in when our workers are as
incapable of supporting themselves and us as the idle rich themselves.
Suppose the foreign countries stop our supplies either by a revolution
followed by flat repudiation of their capitalistic debts, as in Russia, or by
taxing and supertaxing incomes derived from investments, what will
become of us then? What is becoming of us now as taxation of income
spreads more and more in foreign countries? The English servant may still
be able to boast that England can put a more brilliant polish on a multi-
millionaire’s boots than any foreigner can; but what use will that be to us
when the multi-millionaire is an expropriated or taxed-out pauper with no
boots to have polished?

We shall have to go into this question of capital more particularly later on;
but for the purposes of this chapter it is enough to shew that the plan of
depending on oligarchy for our national capital is not only wasteful on the
face of it, but dangerous with a danger that increases with every political
development in the world. The only plea left for it is that there is no other
way of doing it. But that will not hold water for a moment. The Government
can, and to a considerable extent actually does, check personal expenditure
and enforce the use of part of our incomes as capital, far less capriciously
and more efficiently than our oligarchy does. It can nationalize banking, as
we shall see presently. This leaves oligarchy without its sole economic
excuse.

12
DISTRIBUTION BY CLASS

N
OW for the fifth plan, which is, that though everybody should work,
society should be divided into as many classes as there are different
sorts of work, and that the different classes should receive different
payment for their work: for instance, the dustmen and scavengers and
scullery-maids and charwomen and ragpickers should receive less than the
doctors and clergymen and teachers and opera singers and professional
ladies generally, and that these should receive less than the judges and
prime ministers and kings and queens.
You will tell me that this is just what we have at present. Certainly it
happens so in many cases; but there is no law that people employed in
different sorts of work should be paid more or less than oneanother. We are
accustomed to think that schoolmistresses and clergymen and doctors, being
educated ladies and gentlemen, must be paid more than illiterate persons
who work with their hands for weekly wages; but at the present time an
engine driver, making no pretension to be a gentleman, or to have had a
college education, is paid more than many clergymen and some doctors;
and a schoolmistress or governess is very lucky indeed when she is as well
off as a firstrate cook. Some of our most famous physicians have had to
struggle pitiably against insufficient means until they were forty or fifty;
and many a parson has brought up a family on a stipend of seventy pounds
a year. You must therefore be on your guard against the common mistake of
supposing that we need nowadays pay more for gentility and education than
for bodily strength and natural cunning, or that we always do pay more.
Very learned men often make little money or none; and gentility without
property may prove rather a disadvantage than otherwise to a man who
wants to earn a living. Most of the great fortunes are made in trade or
finance, often by men without any advantages of birth or education. Some
of the great poverties have been those of saints, or of geniuses whose
greatness was not recognized until they were dead.

You must also get rid of the notion (if you have it: if not, forgive me for
suspecting you of it) that it costs some workers more than others to live.
The same allowance of food that will keep a laborer in health will keep a
king. Many laborers eat and drink much more than the King does; and all of
them wear out their clothes much faster. Our King is not rich as riches go
nowadays. Mr Rockefeller probably regards His Majesty as a poor man,
because Mr Rockefeller not only has much more money, but is under no
obligation to spend it in keeping up a great establishment: that is, spending
it on other people. But if you could find out how much the King and Mr
Rockefeller spend on their own personal needs and satisfaction, you would
find it came to no more than is now spent by any other two persons in
reasonably comfortable circumstances. If you doubled the King’s allowance
he would not eat twice as much, drink twice as much, sleep twice as
soundly, build a new house twice as big as Buckingham Palace, or marry
another queen and set up two families instead of one. The late Mr Carnegie,
when his thousands grew to hundreds of thousands and his hundreds of
thousands to millions, gave his money away in heaps because he already
had everything he cared for that money could buy for himself or his
household.
Then, it may be asked, why do we give some men more than they need and
some less? The answer is that for the most part we do not give it to them:
they get it because we have not arranged what anyone shall get, but have
left it to chance and grab. But in the case of the King and other public
dignitaries we have arranged that they shall have handsome incomes
because we intend that they shall be specially respected and deferred to. Yet
experience shews that authority is not proportionate to income. No person
in Europe is approached with such awe as the Pope; but nobody thinks of
the Pope as a rich man: sometimes his parents and brothers and sisters are
very humble people, and he himself is poorer than his tailor or grocer. The
captain of a liner sits at table every day with scores of people who could
afford to throw his pay into the sea and not miss it; yet his authority is so
absolute that the most insolent passenger dares not treat him disrespectfully.
The village rector may not have a fifth of the income of his farmer
churchwarden. The colonel of a regiment may be the poorest man at the
mess table: everyone of his subalterns may have far more than double his
income; but he is their superior in authority for all that. Money is not the
secret of command.

Those who exercise personal authority among us are by no means our
richest people. Millionaires in expensive cars obey policemen. In our social
scale noblemen take precedence of country gentlemen, country gentlemen
take precedence of professional men, professional men of traders, wholesale
traders of retail traders, retail traders of skilled workmen, and skilled
workmen of laborers; but if social precedence were according to income all
this would be completely upset; for the tradesmen would take precedence of
everybody; and the Pope and the King would have to touch their hats to
distillers and pork packers.
When we speak of the power of the rich, we are speaking of a very real
thing, because a rich man can discharge anyone in his employment who
displeases him, and can take away his custom from any tradesman who is
disrespectful to him. But the advantage a man gets by his power to ruin
another is a quite different thing from the authority that is necessary to
maintain law and order in society. You may obey the highwayman who puts
a pistol to your head and demands your money or your life. Similarly you
may obey the landlord who orders you to pay more rent or take yourself and
your brats into the street. But that is not obedience to authority: it is
submission to a threat. Real authority has nothing to do with money; and it
is in fact exercised by persons who, from the King to the village constable,
are poorer than many of the people who obey their orders.

13
LAISSER-FAIRE

A
ND now, what about leaving things just as they are?
That is just what most people vote for doing. Even when they dont
like what they are accustomed to, they dread change, lest it should
make matters worse. They are what they call Conservative, though it is only
fair to add that no Conservative statesman in his senses ever pretends
(except perhaps occasionally at election times, when nobody ever tells the
truth) that you can conserve things by simply letting them alone.
It seems the easiest plan and the safest; but as a matter of hard fact it is not
only difficult but impossible. When Joshua told the sun to stand still on
Gibeon, and the moon in the valley of Ajalon, for a trifle of twentyfour
hours, he was modest in comparison with those who imagine that the world
will stay put if they take care not to wake it up. And he knew he was asking
for a miracle.
It is not that things as they are are so bad that nobody who knows how bad
they are will agree to leave them as they are; for the reply to that may be
that if they dont like them they must lump them, because there seems to be
no way of changing them. The real difficulty is that things will not stay as
they are, no matter how careful you are not to meddle with them. You might
as well give up dusting your rooms and expect to find them this time next
year just as they are now. You might as well leave the cat asleep on the
hearthrug and assume that you would find her there, and not in the dairy,
when you came back from church.
The truth is that things change much faster and more dangerously when
they are let alone than when they are carefully looked after. Within the last
hundred and fifty years the most astounding changes have taken place in
this very business that we are dealing with (the production and distribution
of the national income) just because what was everybody’s business was
nobody’s business, and it was let run wild. The introduction of machinery
driven by steam, and later on of electric power distributed from house to

house like water or gas, and the invention of engines that not only draw
trains along the ground and ships over and under the sea, but carry us and
our goods flying through the air, has increased our power to produce wealth
and get through our work easily and quickly to such an extent that there is
no longer any need for any of us to be poor. A labor-saving house with gas
stoves, electric light, a telephone, a vacuum cleaner, and a wireless set,
gives only a faint notion of a modern factory full of automatic machines. If
we each took our turn and did our bit in peace as we had to do during the
war, all the necessary feeding and clothing and housing and lighting could
be done handsomely by less than half our present day’s work, leaving the
other half free for art and science and learning and playing and roaming and
experimenting and recreation of all sorts.
This is a new state of things: a change that has come upon us when we
thought we were leaving things just as they were. And the consequence of
our not attending to it and guiding and arranging it for the good of the
country is that it has actually left the poor much worse off than they used to
be when there was no machinery at all, and people had to be more careful
of pence than they now are of shillings; whilst the rich have become rich
out of all reason, and the people who should be employed in making bread
for the hungry and clothes for the naked, or building houses for the
homeless, are wasting their labor in providing service and luxuries for idle
rich people who are not in the old sense of the words either gentle or noble,
and whose idleness and frivolity and extravagance set a most corrupting
moral example.
Also it has produced two and a half revolutions in political power, by which
the employers have overthrown the landed gentry, the financiers have
overthrown the employers, and the Trade Unions have half overthrown the
financiers. I shall explain this fully later on; meanwhile, you have seen
enough of its effects in the rise of the Labor Party to take my word for it
that politics will not stand still any more than industry merely because
millions of timid old-fashioned people vote at every election for what they
call Conservatism: that is, for shutting our eyes and opening our mouths.
If King Alfred had been told that the time would come in England when one
idle family would have five big houses and a steam yacht to live in whilst
hard-working people were living six in a room, and half starving at that, he
would have said that God would never allow such things to happen except

in a very wicked nation. Well, we have left God out of the question and
allowed it to happen, not through wickedness, but through letting things
alone and fancying that they would let themselves alone.
Have you noticed, by the way, that we no longer speak of letting things
alone in the old-fashioned way? We speak of letting them slide; and this is a
great advance in good sense; for it shews that we at last see that they slide
instead of staying put; and it implies that letting them slide is a feckless sort
of conduct. So you must rule out once for all the notion of leaving things as
they are in the expectation that they will stay where they are. They wont.
All we can do in that line is to sit idly and wonder what will happen next.
And this is not like sitting on the bank of the stream waiting for the water to
go by. It is like sitting idly in a carriage when the horse is running away.
You can excuse it by saying “What else can I do?”; but your impotence will
not avert a smash. People in that predicament must all think hard of some
way of getting control of the horse, and meanwhile do all they can to keep
the carriage right side up and out of the ditch.
The policy of letting things alone, in the practical sense that the
Government should never interfere with business or go into business itself,
is called Laisser-faire by economists and politicians. It has broken down so
completely in practice that it is now discredited; but it was all the fashion in
politics a hundred years ago, and is still influentially advocated by men of
business and their backers who naturally would like to be allowed to make
money as they please without regard to the interests of the public.

14
HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH?

W
E seem now to have disposed of all the plans except the Socialist
one. Before grappling with that, may I call your attention to
something that happened in our examination of most of the others.
We were trying to find out a sound plan of distributing money; and every
time we proposed to distribute it according to personal merit or
achievement or dignity or individual quality of any sort the plan reduced
itself to absurdity. When we tried to establish a relation between money and
work we were beaten: it could not be done. When we tried to establish a
relation between money and character we were beaten. When we tried to
establish a relation between money and the dignity that gives authority we
were beaten. And when we gave it up as a bad job and thought of leaving
things as they are we found that they would not stay as they are.
Let us then consider for a moment what any plan must do to be acceptable.
And first, as everybody except the Franciscan Friars and the Poor Clares
will say that no plan will be acceptable unless it abolishes poverty (and
even Franciscan poverty must be voluntary and not compelled) let us study
poverty for a moment.
It is generally agreed that poverty is a very uncomfortable misfortune for
the individual who happens to be poor. But poor people, when they are not
suffering from acute hunger and severe cold, are not more unhappy than
rich people: they are often much happier. You can easily find people who
are ten times as rich at sixty as they were at twenty; but not one of them will
tell you that they are ten times as happy. All the thoughtful ones will assure
you that happiness and unhappiness are constitutional, and have nothing to
do with money. Money can cure hunger: it cannot cure unhappiness. Food
can satisfy the appetite, but not the soul. A famous German Socialist,
Ferdinand Lassalle, said that what beat him in his efforts to stir up the poor
to revolt against poverty was their wantlessness. They were not, of course,
content: nobody is; but they were not discontented enough to take any
serious trouble to change their condition. It may seem a fine thing to a poor

woman to have a large house, plenty of servants, dozens of dresses, a lovely
complexion and beautifully dressed hair. But the rich woman who has these
things often spends a good deal of her time travelling in rough places to get
away from them. To have to spend two or three hours a day washing and
dressing and brushing and combing and changing and being messed about
generally by a lady’s maid is not on the face of it a happier lot than to have
only five minutes to spend on such fatigues, as the soldiers call them.
Servants are so troublesome that many ladies can hardly talk about anything
else when they get together. A drunken man is happier than a sober one: that
is why unhappy people take to drink. There are drugs that will make you
ecstatically happy whilst ruining your body and soul. It is our quality that
matters: take care of that, and our happiness will take care of itself. People
of the right sort are never easy until they get things straight; but they are too
healthy and too much taken up with their occupations to bother about
happiness. Modern poverty is not the poverty that was blest in the Sermon
on the Mount: the objection to it is not that it makes people unhappy, but
that it degrades them; and the fact that they can be quite as happy in their
degradation as their betters are in their exaltation makes it worse. When
Shakespear’s king said

Then happy low, lie down:
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,

he forgot that happiness is no excuse for lowness. The divine spark in us
flashes up against being bribed to submit to degradation by mere happiness,
which a pig or a drunkard can achieve.
Such poverty as we have today in all our great cities degrades the poor, and
infects with its degradation the whole neighborhood in which they live. And
whatever can degrade a neighborhood can degrade a country and a
continent and finally the whole civilized world, which is only a large
neighborhood. Its bad effects cannot be escaped by the rich. When poverty
produces outbreaks of virulent infectious disease, as it always does sooner
or later, the rich catch the disease and see their children die of it. When it
produces crime and violence the rich go in fear of both, and are put to a
good deal of expense to protect their persons and property. When it
produces bad manners and bad language the children of the rich pick them
up no matter how carefully they are secluded; and such seclusion as they

get does them more harm than good. If poor and pretty young women find,
as they do, that they can make more money by vice than by honest work,
they will poison the blood of rich young men who, when they marry, will
infect their wives and children, and cause them all sorts of bodily troubles,
sometimes ending in disfigurement and blindness and death, and always
doing them more or less mischief. The old notion that people can “keep
themselves to themselves” and not be touched by what is happening to their
neighbors, or even to the people who live a hundred miles off, is a most
dangerous mistake. The saying that we are members one of another is not a
mere pious formula to be repeated in church without any meaning: it is a
literal truth; for though the rich end of the town can avoid living with the
poor end, it cannot avoid dying with it when the plague comes. People will
be able to keep themselves to themselves as much as they please when they
have made an end of poverty; but until then they will not be able to shut out
the sights and sounds and smells of poverty from their daily walks, nor to
feel sure from day to day that its most violent and fatal evils will not reach
them through their strongest police guards.
Besides, as long as poverty remains possible we shall never be sure that it
will not overtake ourselves. If we dig a pit for others we may fall into it: if
we leave a precipice unfenced our children may fall over it when they are
playing. We see the most innocent and respectable families falling into the
unfenced pit of poverty every day; and how do we know that it will not be
our turn next?
It is perhaps the greatest folly of which a nation can be guilty to attempt to
use poverty as a sort of punishment for offences that it does not send people
to prison for. It is easy to say of a lazy man “Oh, let him be poor: it serves
him right for being lazy: it will teach him a lesson”. In saying so we are
ourselves too lazy to think a little before we lay down the law. We cannot
afford to have poor people anyhow, whether they be lazy or busy, drunken
or sober, virtuous or vicious, thrifty or careless, wise or foolish. If they
deserve to suffer let them be made to suffer in some other way; for mere
poverty will not hurt them half as much as it will hurt their innocent
neighbors. It is a public nuisance as well as a private misfortune. Its
toleration is a national crime.
We must therefore take it as an indispensable condition of a sound
distribution of wealth that everyone must have a share sufficient to keep her

or him from poverty. This is not altogether new. Ever since the days of
Queen Elizabeth it has been the law of England that nobody must be
abandoned to destitution. If anyone, however undeserving, applies for relief
to the Guardians of the Poor as a destitute person, the Guardians must feed
and clothe and house that person. They may do it reluctantly and unkindly;
they may attach to the relief the most unpleasant and degrading conditions
they can think of; they may set the pauper to hateful useless work if he is
able-bodied, and have him sent to prison if he refuses to do it; the shelter
they give him may be that of a horrible general workhouse in which the old
and the young, the sound and the diseased, the innocent girl and lad and the
hardened prostitute and tramp are herded together promiscuously to
contaminate one another; they can attach a social stigma to the relief by
taking away the pauper’s vote (if he has one), and making him incapable of
filling certain public offices or being elected to certain public authorities;
they may, in short, drive the deserving and respectable poor to endure any
extremity rather than ask for relief; but they must relieve the destitute willy
nilly if they do ask for it. To that extent the law of England is at its root a
Communistic law. All the harshnesses and wickednesses with which it is
carried out are gross mistakes, because instead of saving the country from
the degradation of poverty they actually make poverty more degrading than
it need be; but still, the principle is there. Queen Elizabeth said that nobody
must die of starvation and exposure. We, after the terrible experience we
have had of the effects of poverty on the whole nation, rich or poor, must go
further and say that nobody must be poor. As we divide-up our wealth day
by day the first charge on it must be enough for everybody to be fairly
respectable and well-to-do. If they do anything or leave anything undone
that gives ground for saying that they do not deserve it, let them be
restrained from doing it or compelled to do it in whatever way we restrain
or compel evildoers of any other sort; but do not let them, as poor people,
make everyone else suffer for their shortcomings.
Granted that people should not on any account be allowed to be poor, we
have still to consider whether they should be allowed to be rich. When
poverty is gone, shall we tolerate luxury and extravagance? This is a poser,
because it is much easier to say what poverty is than what luxury is. When a
woman is hungry, or ragged, or has not at least one properly furnished room
all to herself to sleep in, then she is clearly suffering from poverty. When
the infant mortality in one district is much greater than in another; when the

average age of death for fully grown persons in it falls far short of the
scriptural threescore-and-ten; when the average weight of the children who
survive is below that reached by well-fed and well-cared-for children, then
you can say confidently that the people in that district are suffering from
poverty. But suffering from riches is not so easily measured. That rich
people do suffer a great deal is plain enough to anyone who has an intimate
knowledge of their lives. They are so unhealthy that they are always
running after cures and surgical operations of one sort or another. When
they are not really ill they imagine they are. They are worried by their
property, by their servants, by their poor relations, by their investments, by
the need for keeping up their social position, and, when they have several
children, by the impossibility of leaving these children enough to enable
them to live as they have been brought up to live; for we must not forget
that if a married couple with fifty thousand a year have five children, they
can leave only ten thousand a year to each after bringing them up to live at
the rate of fifty thousand, and launching them into the sort of society that
lives at that rate, the result being that unless these children can make rich
marriages they live beyond their incomes (not knowing how to live more
cheaply) and are presently head over ears in debt. They hand on their costly
habits and rich friends and debts to their children with very little else; so
that the trouble becomes worse and worse from generation to generation;
and this is how we meet everywhere with ladies and gentlemen who have
no means of keeping up their position, and are therefore much more
miserable than the common poor.
Perhaps you know some well-off families who do not seem to suffer from
their riches. They do not overeat themselves; they find occupations to keep
themselves in health; they do not worry about their position; they put their
money into safe investments and are content with a low rate of interest; and
they bring up their children to live simply and do useful work. But this
means that they do not live like rich people at all, and might therefore just
as well have ordinary incomes. The general run of rich people do not know
what to do with themselves; and the end of it is that they have to join a
round of social duties and pleasures mostly manufactured by West End
shopkeepers, and so tedious that at the end of a fashionable season the rich
are more worn out than their servants and tradesmen. They may have no
taste for sport; but they are forced by their social position to go to the great
race meetings and ride to hounds. They may have no taste for music; but

they have to go to the Opera and to the fashionable concerts. They may not
dress as they please nor do what they please. Because they are rich they
must do what all the other rich people are doing, there being nothing else
for them to do except work, which would immediately reduce them to the
condition of ordinary people. So, as they cannot do what they like, they
must contrive to like what they do, and imagine that they are having a
splendid time of it when they are in fact being bored by their amusements,
humbugged by their doctors, pillaged by their tradesmen, and forced to
console themselves unamiably for being snubbed by richer people by
snubbing poorer people.
To escape this boredom, the able and energetic spirits go into Parliament or
into the diplomatic service or into the army, or manage and develop their
estates and investments instead of leaving them to solicitors and
stockbrokers and agents, or explore unknown countries with great hardship
and risk to themselves, with the result that their lives are not different from
the lives of the people who have to do these things for a living. Thus riches
are thrown away on them; and if it were not for the continual dread of
falling into poverty which haunts us all at present they would refuse to be
bothered with much property. The only people who get any special
satisfaction out of being richer than others are those who enjoy being idle,
and like to fancy that they are better than their neighbors and be treated as if
they were. But no country can afford to pamper snobbery. Laziness and
vanity are not virtues to be encouraged: they are vices to be suppressed.
Besides, the desire to be idle and lazy and able to order poor people about
could not be satisfied, even if it were right to satisfy it, if there were no poor
people to order about. What we should have would be, not poor people and
rich people, but simply people with enough and people with more than
enough. And that brings up at last the knotty question, what is enough?
In Shakespear’s famous play, King Lear and his daughters have an
argument about this. His idea of enough is having a hundred knights to wait
on him. His eldest daughter thinks that fifty would be enough. Her sister
does not see what he wants with any knights at all when her servants can do
all he needs for him. Lear retorts that if she cuts life down to what cannot be
done without, she had better throw away her fine clothes, as she would be
warmer in a blanket. And to this she has no answer. Nobody can say what is
enough. What is enough for a gipsy is not enough for a lady; and what is

enough for one lady leaves another very discontented. When once you get
above the poverty line there is no reason why you should stop there. With
modern machinery we can produce much more than enough to feed, clothe,
and house us decently. There is no end to the number of new things we can
get into the habit of using, or to the improvements we can make in the
things we already use. Our grandmothers managed to get on without gas
cookers, electric light, motor cars, and telephones; but today these things
are no longer curiosities and luxuries: they are matter-of-course necessities;
and nobody who cannot afford them is considered well-off.
In the same way the standard of education and culture has risen. Nowadays
a parlormaid as ignorant as Queen Victoria was when she came to the
throne would be classed as mentally defective. As Queen Victoria managed
to get on very well in spite of her ignorance it cannot be said that the
knowledge in which the parlormaid has the advantage of her is a necessity
of civilized life any more than a telephone is; but civilized life and highly
civilized life are different: what is enough for one is not enough for the
other. Take a half-civilized girl into a house; and though she may be
stronger and more willing and goodnatured than many highly civilized girls
are, she will smash everything that will not stand the roughest handling. She
will be unable to take or send written messages; and as to understanding or
using such civilized contrivances as watches, baths, sewing machines, and
electric heaters and sweepers, you will be fortunate if you can induce her to
turn off a tap instead of leaving the water running. And your civilized maid
who can be trusted with all these things would be like a bull in a china shop
if she were let loose in the laboratories where highly trained scientific
workers use machines and instruments of such delicacy that their
movements are as invisible as that of the hour hands of our clocks, handling
and controlling poisons and explosives of the most dangerous kind; or in
the operating rooms where surgeons have to do things in which a slip of the
hand might prove fatal. If every housemaid had the delicacy of touch, the
knowledge, and the patience that are needed in the laboratories and
operating theatres (where they are unfortunately not always forthcoming),
the most wonderful changes could be made in our housekeeping: we could
not only have the present work done much more quickly, perfectly, and
cleanly, but we could do a great deal that is now quite impossible.

Now it costs more to educate and train a laboratory worker than a
housemaid, and more to train a housemaid than to catch a savage. What is
enough in one case is not enough in another. Therefore to ask baldly how
much is enough to live on is to ask an unanswerable question. It all depends
on what sort of life you propose to live. What is enough for the life of a
tramp is not enough for a highly civilized life, with its personal refinements
and its atmosphere of music, art, literature, religion, science, and
philosophy. Of these things we can never have enough: there is always
something new to be discovered and something old to be bettered. In short,
there is no such thing as enough civilization, though there may be enough
of any particular thing like bread or boots at any particular moment. If
being poor means wanting something more and something better than we
have—and it is hard to say what else feeling poor means—then we shall
always feel poor no matter how much money we have, because, though we
may have enough of this thing or of that thing, we shall never have enough
of everything. Consequently if it be proposed to give some people enough,
and others more than enough, the scheme will break down; for all the
money will be used up before anybody will be content. Nobody will stop
asking for more for the sake of setting up and maintaining a fancy class of
pampered persons who, after all, will be even more discontented than their
poorer neighbors.
The only way out of this difficulty is to give everybody the same, which is
the Socialist solution of the distribution problem. But you may tell me that
you are prepared to swallow this difficulty rather than swallow Socialism.
Most of us begin like that. What converts us is the discovery of the terrible
array of evils around us and dangers in front of us which we dare not
ignore. You may be unable to see any beauty in equality of income. But the
least idealistic woman can see the disasters of inequality when the evils
with which she is herself in daily conflict are traced to it; and I am now
going to shew you the connexion.

15
WHAT WE SHOULD BUY FIRST

T
O test the effects of our unequal division of the nation’s income on
our national institutions and on the life and prosperity of the whole
people we must view the industry of the country, and see how it is
affected by inequality of income. We must view one by one the institution
of marriage, the working of the courts of justice, the honesty of our Houses
of Parliament, the spiritual independence of the Church, the usefulness of
our schools, and the quality of our newspapers, and consider how each of
them is dependent on the way in which money is distributed.
Beginning with industry, we are at once plunged into what we call political
economy, to distinguish it from the domestic economy with which we are
all only too familiar. Men find political economy a dry and difficult subject:
they shirk it as they shirk housekeeping; yet it means nothing more abstruse
than the art of managing a country as a housekeeper manages a house. If the
men shirk it the women must tackle it. The nation has a certain income to
manage on just as a housekeeper has; and the problem is how to spend that
income to the greatest general advantage.
Now the first thing a housekeeper has to settle is what things are wanted
most, and what things can be done without at a pinch. This means that the
housekeeper must settle the order in which things are desirable. For
example, if, when there is not enough food in the house, she goes out and
spends all her money on a bottle of scent and an imitation pearl necklace,
she will be called a vain and silly woman and a bad mother. But a
stateswoman would call her simply a bad economist: one who does not
know what should come first when money has to be spent. No woman is fit
to have charge of a household who has not sense and self-control enough to
see that food and clothing and housing and firing come first, and that bottles
of scent and pearl necklaces, imitation or real, come a long way afterwards.
Even in the jeweller’s shop a wrist watch comes before a necklace as being
more useful. I am not saying that pretty things are not useful: they are very
useful and quite right in their proper order; but they do not come first. A

Bible may be a very proper present to give to a child; but to give a starving
child a Bible instead of a piece of bread and a cup of milk would be the act
of a lunatic. A woman’s mind is more wonderful than her flesh; but if her
flesh is not fed her mind will perish, whereas if you feed her flesh her mind
will take care of itself and of her flesh as well. Food comes first.
Think of the whole country as a big household, and the whole nation as a
big family, which is what they really are. What do we see? Half-fed, badly
clothed, abominably housed children all over the place; and the money that
should go to feed and clothe and house them properly being spent in
millions on bottles of scent, pearl necklaces, pet dogs, racing motor cars,
January strawberries that taste like corks, and all sorts of extravagances.
One sister of the national family has a single pair of leaking boots that keep
her sniffing all through the winter, and no handkerchief to wipe her nose
with. Another has forty pairs of high-heeled shoes and dozens of
handkerchiefs. A little brother is trying to grow up on a penn’orth of food a
day, and is breaking his mother’s heart and wearing out her patience by
asking continually for more, whilst a big brother, spending five or six
pounds on his dinner at a fashionable hotel, followed by supper at a night
club, is in the doctor’s hands because he is eating and drinking too much.
Now this is shockingly bad political economy. When thoughtless people are
asked to explain it they say “Oh, the woman with the forty shoes and the
man drinking at the night club got their money from their father who made
a fortune by speculating in rubber; and the girl with the broken boots, and
the troublesome boy whose mother has just clouted his head, are only
riffraff from the slums”. That is true; but it does not alter the fact that the
nation that spends money on champagne before it has provided enough milk
for its babies, or gives dainty meals to Sealyham terriers and Alsatian wolf-
hounds and Pekingese dogs whilst the infant mortality rate shews that its
children are dying by thousands from insufficient nourishment, is a badly
managed, silly, vain, stupid, ignorant nation, and will go to the bad in the
long run no matter how hard it tries to conceal its real condition from itself
by counting the pearl necklaces and Pekingese dogs as wealth, and thinking
itself three times as rich as before when all the pet dogs have litters of six
puppies a couple. The only way in which a nation can make itself wealthy
and prosperous is by good housekeeping: that is, by providing for its wants

in the order of their importance, and allowing no money to be wasted on
whims and luxuries until necessities have been thoroughly served.
But it is no use blaming the owners of the dogs. All these mischievous
absurdities exist, not because any sane person ever wanted them to exist,
but because they must occur whenever some families are very much richer
than others. The rich man, who, as husband and father, drags the woman
with him, begins as every one else begins, by buying food, clothing, and a
roof to shelter them. The poor man does the same. But when the poor man
has spent all he can afford on these necessaries, he is still short of them: his
food is insufficient; his clothes are old and dirty; his lodging is a single
room or part of one, and unwholesome even at that. But when the rich man
has fed himself, and dressed himself, and housed himself as sumptuously as
possible, he has still plenty of money left to indulge his tastes and fancies
and make a show in the world. Whilst the poor man says “I want more
bread, more clothes, and a better house for my family; but I cannot pay for
them”, the rich man says “I want a fleet of motor cars, a yacht, diamonds
and pearls for my wife and daughters, and a shooting-box in Scotland.
Money is no object: I can pay and overpay for them ten times over”.
Naturally men of business set to work at once to have the cars and the yacht
made, the diamonds dug out in Africa, the pearls fished for, and the
shooting lodge built, paying no attention to the poor man with his crying
needs and empty pockets.
To put the same thing in another way, the poor man needs to have labor
employed in making the things he is short of: that is, in baking, weaving,
tailoring, and plain building; but he cannot pay the master bakers and
weavers enough to enable them to pay the wages of such labor. The rich
man meanwhile is offering money enough to provide good wages for all the
work required to please him. All the people who take his money may be
working hard; but their work is pampering people who have too much
instead of feeding people who have too little; therefore it is misapplied and
wasted, keeping the country poor and even making it poorer for the sake of
keeping a few people rich.
It is no excuse for such a state of things that the rich give employment.
There is no merit in giving employment: a murderer gives employment to
the hangman; and a motorist who runs over a child gives employment to an
ambulance porter, a doctor, an undertaker, a clergyman, a mourning-

dressmaker, a hearse driver, a gravedigger: in short, to so many worthy
people that when he ends by killing himself it seems ungrateful not to erect
a statue to him as a public benefactor. The money with which the rich give
the wrong sort of employment would give the right sort of employment if it
were equally distributed; for then there would be no money offered for
motor cars and diamonds until everyone was fed, clothed, and lodged, nor
any wages offered to men and women to leave useful employments and
become servants to idlers. There would be less ostentation, less idleness,
less wastefulness, less uselessness; but there would be more food, more
clothing, better houses, more security, more health, more virtue: in a word,
more real prosperity.

16
EUGENICS

T
HE question has been asked, would the masses be any better for
having more money? One’s first impulse on hearing such a silly
question is to take the lady who asks it by the shoulders and give her
a violent shaking. If a fully fed, presentably clothed, decently housed, fairly
literate and cultivated and gently mannered family is not better than a half-
starved, ragged, frowsy, overcrowded one, there is no meaning in words.
Still, let us not lose our tempers. A well-fed, clean, decently lodged woman
is better than one trying to live on tea and rashers in dirty clothes in a
verminous garret. But so is a well-fed clean sow better than a hungry dirty
one. She is a sow all the same; and you cannot make a silk purse out of her
ear. If the common women of the future were to be no better than our rich
ladies today, even at their best, the improvement would leave us deeply
dissatisfied. And that dissatisfaction would be a divine dissatisfaction. Let
us consider, then, what effect equality of income would have on the quality
of our people as human beings.
There are some who say that if you want better people you must breed them
as carefully as you breed thoroughbred horses and pedigree boars. No doubt
you must; but there are two difficulties. First, you cannot very well mate
men and women as you mate bulls and cows, stallions and mares, boars and
sows, without giving them any choice in the matter. Second, even if you
could, you would not know how to do it, because you would not know what
sort of human being you wanted to breed. In the case of a horse or a pig the
matter is very simple: you want either a very fast horse for racing or a very
strong horse for drawing loads; and in the case of the pig you want simply
plenty of bacon. And yet, simple as that is, any breeder of these animals will
tell you that he has a great many failures no matter how careful he is.
The moment you ask yourself what sort of child you want, beyond
preferring a boy or a girl, you have to confess that you do not know. At best
you can mention a few sorts that you dont want: for instance, you dont want
cripples, deaf mutes, blind, imbecile, epileptic, or drunken children. But

even these you do not know how to avoid as there is often nothing visibly
wrong with the parents of such unfortunates. When you turn from what you
dont want to what you do want you may say that you want good children;
but a good child means only a child that gives its parents no trouble; and
some very useful men and women have been very troublesome children.
Energetic, imaginative, enterprising, brave children are never out of
mischief from their parents’ point of view. And grown-up geniuses are
seldom liked until they are dead. Considering that we poisoned Socrates,
crucified Christ, and burnt Joan of Arc amid popular applause, because,
after a trial by responsible lawyers and Churchmen, we decided that they
were too wicked to be allowed to live, we can hardly set up to be judges of
goodness or to have any sincere liking for it.
Even if we were willing to trust any political authority to select our
husbands and wives for us with a view to improving the race, the officials
would be hopelessly puzzled as to how to select. They might begin with
some rough idea of preventing the marriage of persons with any taint of
consumption or madness or syphilis or addiction to drugs or drink in their
families; but that would end in nobody being married at all, as there is
practically no family quite free from such taints. As to moral excellence,
what model would they take as desirable? St Francis, George Fox, William
Penn, John Wesley, and George Washington? or Alexander, Caesar,
Napoleon, and Bismarck? It takes all sorts to make a world; and the notion
of a Government department trying to make out how many different types
were necessary, and how many persons of each type, and proceeding to
breed them by appropriate marriages, is amusing but not practicable. There
is nothing for it but to let people choose their mates for themselves, and
trust to Nature to produce a good result.
“Just as we do at present, in fact,” some will say. But that is just what we do
not do at present. How much choice has anyone among us when the time
comes to choose a mate? Nature may point out a woman’s mate to her by
making her fall in love at first sight with the man who would be the best
mate for her; but unless that man happens to have about the same income as
her father, he is out of her class and out of her reach, whether above her or
below her. She finds she must marry, not the man she likes, but the man she
can get; and he is not often the same man.

The man is in the same predicament. We all know by instinct that it is
unnatural to marry for money or social position instead of for love; yet we
have arranged matters so that we must all marry more or less for money or
social position or both. It is easy to say to Miss Smith or Miss Jones
“Follow the promptings of your heart, my dear; and marry the dustman or
marry the duke, whichever you prefer”. But she cannot marry the dustman;
and the duke cannot marry her; because they and their relatives have not the
same manners and habits; and people with different manners and habits
cannot live together. And it is difference of income that makes difference of
manners and habits. Miss Smith and Miss Jones have finally to make up
their minds to like what they can get, because they can very seldom get
what they like; and it is safe to say that in the great majority of marriages at
present Nature has very little part in the choice compared to circumstances.
Unsuitable marriages, unhappy homes, ugly children are terribly common;
because the young woman who ought to have all the unmarried young men
in the country open to her choice, with dozens of other strings to her bow in
the event of her first choice not feeling a reciprocal attraction, finds that in
fact she has to choose between two or three in her own class, and has to
allow herself to be much petted and tempted by physical endearments, or
made desperate by neglect, before she can persuade herself that she really
loves the one she dislikes least.
Under such circumstances we shall never get a well-bred race; and it is all
the fault of inequality of income. If every family were brought up at the
same cost, we should all have the same habits, manners, culture, and
refinement; and the dustman’s daughter could marry the duke’s son as
easily as a stockbroker’s son now marries a bank manager’s daughter.
Nobody would marry for money, because there would be no money to be
gained or lost by marriage. No woman would have to turn her back on a
man she loved because he was poor, or be herself passed by for the same
reason. All the disappointments would be natural and inevitable
disappointments; and there would be plenty of alternatives and
consolations. If the race did not improve under these circumstances, it must
be unimprovable. And even if it be so, the gain in happiness by getting rid
of the heartbreak that now makes the world, and especially its women, so
miserable, would make the equalization of income worth while even if all
the other arguments for it did not exist.

17
THE COURTS OF LAW

W
HEN we come to the courts of law the hopeless incompatibility of
inequality of income with justice is so plain that you must have
been struck by it if you ever notice such things. The very first
condition of legal justice is that it shall be no respecter of persons; that it
shall hold the balance impartially between the laborer’s wife and the
millionairess; and that no person shall be deprived of life or liberty except
by the verdict of a jury of her peers, meaning her equals. Now no laborer is
ever tried by a jury of his peers: he is tried by a jury of ratepayers who have
a very strong class prejudice against him because they have larger incomes,
and consider themselves better men on that account. Even a rich man tried
by a common jury has to reckon with their envy as well as their
subservience to wealth. Thus it is a common saying with us that there is one
law for the rich and another for the poor. This is not strictly true: the law is
the same for everybody: it is the incomes that need changing. The civil law
by which contracts are enforced, and redress given for slanders and injuries
that are not dealt with by the police, requires so much legal knowledge and
artistic eloquence to set it in motion that an ordinary woman with no legal
knowledge or eloquence can get the benefit of it only by employing lawyers
whom she has to pay very highly, which means, of course, that the rich
woman can afford to go to law and the poor woman cannot. The rich
woman can terrorize the poor woman by threatening to go to law with her if
her demands are not complied with. She can disregard the poor woman’s
rights, and tell her that if she is dissatisfied she can take her complaint into
court, knowing very well that her victim’s poverty and ignorance will
prevent her from obtaining proper legal advice and protection. When a rich
woman takes a fancy to a poor woman’s husband, and persuades him to
abandon her, she can practically buy him by starving the abandoned wife
into divorcing him for a sufficient allowance. In America, where the wife
can sue for damages, the price of the divorce is higher: that is all. When the
abandoned wife cannot be starved into the divorce court she can stand out
for an exorbitant price before setting her husband free to remarry; and an

abandoned husband can sell out likewise. Men and women now trap one
another into marriage with this object to such an extent that in some States
the word alimony has come to mean simply blackmail. Mind: I am not
disparaging either divorce or alimony. What is wrong is that any woman
should by mere superiority of income be able to make another woman’s
husband much more comfortable than his wife can, or that any man should
be able to offer another man’s wife luxuries that her husband cannot afford:
in short, that money should have any weight whatever either in contracting
or dissolving a marriage.
The criminal law, though we read murder trials and the like so eagerly, is
less important than the civil law, because only a few exceptional people
commit crimes, whilst we all marry and make civil contracts. Besides, the
police set the criminal law in motion without charging the injured party
anything. Nevertheless, rich prisoners are favored by being able to spend
large sums in engaging famous barristers to plead for them, hunting up
evidence all over the country or indeed over the world, bribing or
intimidating witnesses, and exhausting every possible form of appeal and
method of delay. We are fond of pointing to American cases of rich men at
large who would have been hanged or electrocuted if they had been poor.
But who knows how many poor people are in prison in England who might
have been acquitted if they could have spent a few hundred pounds on their
defence?
The laws themselves are contaminated at their very source by being made
by rich men. Nominally all adult men and women are eligible to sit in
Parliament and make laws if they can persuade enough people to vote for
them. Something has been done of late years to make it possible for poor
persons to avail themselves of this right. Members of Parliament now
receive salaries; and certain election expenses formerly borne by the
candidate are now public charges. But the candidate must put down £150 to
start with; and it still costs from five hundred to a thousand pounds to
contest a parliamentary election. Even when the candidate is successful, the
salary of four hundred a year, which carries with it no pension and no
prospects when the seat is lost (as it may be at the next election) is not
sufficient for the sort of life in London a member of Parliament is obliged to
lead. This gives the rich such an advantage that though the poor are in a
nine-to-one majority in the country their representatives are in a minority in

Parliament; and most of the time of Parliament is taken up, not by
discussing what is best for the nation, and passing laws accordingly, but by
the class struggle set up by the rich majority trying to maintain and extend
its privileges against the poor minority trying to curtail or abolish them.
That is, in pure waste of it.
By far the most unjust and mischievous privilege claimed by the rich is the
privilege to be idle with complete legal impunity; and unfortunately they
have established this privilege so firmly that we take it as a matter of
course, and even venerate it as the mark of a real lady or gentleman,
without ever considering that a person who consumes goods or accepts
services without producing equivalent goods or performing equivalent
services in return inflicts on the country precisely the same injury as a thief
does: in fact, that is what theft means. We do not dream of allowing people
to murder, kidnap, break into houses, sink, burn, and destroy at sea or on
land, or claim exemption from military service, merely because they have
inherited a landed estate or a thousand a year from some industrious
ancestor; yet we tolerate idling, which does more harm in one year than all
the legally punishable crimes in the world in ten. The rich, through their
majority in Parliament, punish with ruthless severity such forms of theft as
burglary, forgery, embezzlement, pocket-picking, larceny, and highway
robbery, whilst they exempt rich idling, and even hold it up as a highly
honorable way of life, thereby teaching our children that working for a
livelihood is inferior, derogatory, and disgraceful. To live like a drone on
the labor and service of others is to be a lady or a gentleman: to enrich the
country by labor and service is to be base, lowly, vulgar, contemptible, fed
and clothed and lodged on the assumption that anything is good enough for
hewers of wood and drawers of water. This is nothing else than an attempt
to turn the order of Nature upside down, and to take “Evil: be thou my
good” as the national motto. If we persist in it, it must finally bring upon us
another of those wrecks of civilization in which all the great empires in the
past have crashed. Yet nothing can prevent this happening where income is
unequally distributed, because the laws will inevitably be made by the rich;
and the law that all must work, which should come before every other law,
is a law that the rich never make.

18
THE IDLE RICH

D
O not let yourself be put out at this point by the fact that people with
large unearned incomes are by no means always loafing or lolling.
The energetic ones often overexert themselves, and have to take
“rest cures” to recover. Those who try to make life one long holiday find
that they need a holiday from that too. Idling is so unnatural and boresome
that the world of the idle rich, as they are called, is a world of ceaseless
activities of the most fatiguing kind. You may find on old bookshelves a
forgotten nineteenth century book in which a Victorian lady of fashion
defended herself against the charge of idleness by describing her daily
routine of fashion both as hostess and visitor in London. I would cheerfully
sweep a crossing rather than be condemned to it. In the country, sport is so
elaborately organized that every month in the year has its special variety:
the necessary fishes and birds and animals are so carefully bred and
preserved for the purpose that there is always something to be killed. Risks
and exposures and athletic feats of which the poor in towns know nothing
are matters of course in the country house, where broken collar bones are
hardly exceptional enough to be classed as accidents. If sports fail there are
always games: ski-ing and tobogganing, polo, tennis, skating on artificial
ice, and so forth, involving much more exhausting physical exercise than
many poor women would care to face. A young lady, after a day of such
exercise, will, between dinner and bedtime, dance a longer distance than the
postman walks. In fact the only people who are disgustingly idle are the
children of those who have just become rich, the new rich as they are
called. As these unfortunate fortunates have had neither the athletic training
nor the social discipline of the old rich, with whom what we call high life is
a skilled art needing a stern apprenticeship, they do not know what to do
with themselves; and their resourceless loafing and consumption of
chocolate creams, cigarets, cocktails, and the sillier sort of novels and
illustrated papers whilst they drift about in motor cars from one big hotel to
another, is pitiable. But in the next generation they either relapse into

poverty or go to school with the class they can now afford to belong to, and
acquire its accomplishments, its discipline, and its manners.
But beside this Spartan routine invented to employ people who have not to
work for their living, and which, you will notice, is a survival of the old
tribal order in which the braves hunted and fought whilst the squaws did the
domestic work, there is the necessary public work which must be done by a
governing class if it is to keep all political power in its own hands. By not
paying for this work, or paying so little for it that nobody without an
unearned income can afford to undertake it, and by attaching to the upper
division of the civil service examination tests that only expensively
educated persons can pass, this work is kept in the hands of the rich. That is
the explanation of the otherwise unaccountable way in which the
proprietary class has opposed every attempt to attach sufficient salaries to
parliamentary work to make those who do it self-supporting, although the
proprietors themselves were the holders of the main parliamentary posts.
Though they officered the army, they did everything they could to make it
impossible for an officer to live on his pay. Though they contested every
parliamentary seat, they opposed the public payment of members of
Parliament and their election expenses. Though they regarded the
diplomatic service as a preserve for their younger sons, they attached to it
the condition that no youth should be eligible for it without a private
income of four hundred a year. They fought, and still fight, against making
government a self-supporting occupation, because the effect would be to
throw it open to the unpropertied, and destroy their own monopoly of it.
But as the work of government must be done, they must do it themselves if
they will not let other people do it. Consequently you find rich men
working in Parliament, in diplomacy, in the army, in the magistracy, and on
local public bodies, to say nothing of the management of their own estates.
Men so working cannot accurately be called the idle rich. Unfortunately
they do all this governing work with a bias in favour of the privilege of their
class to be idle. From the point of view of the public good, it would be far
better if they amused themselves like most of their class, and left the work
of governing to be done by well-paid officials and ministers whose interests
were those of the nation as a whole.
The stamina of the women of the idle class was formerly maintained by
their work in childbearing and family housekeeping. But at present many of

them resort to contraception (called birth control) not to regulate the
number of their children and the time of their birth, but to avoid bearing any
children at all. Hotel life, or life in service flats, or the delegation of
household management to professional ladies who are practically private
hotel managers, is more and more substituted for old-fashioned domestic
housekeeping. If this were an ordinary division of labor to enable a woman
to devote herself entirely to a professional career of some sort, it would be
defensible; for many women, as you must often have noticed, have no
aptitude for domestic work, and are as much out of place in the kitchen and
nursery as all men are conventionally supposed to be; but when you have
women with unearned and excessive incomes its possibility involves an
equal possibility of complete uselessness and self-indulgence, of which
many rich women, knowing no better, take the fullest advantage.
There are always a few cases in which exceptional men and women with
sufficient unearned income to maintain them handsomely without a stroke
of work are found working harder than most of those who have to do it for a
living, and spending most of their money on attempts to better the world.
Florence Nightingale organized the hospital work of the Crimean war,
including the knocking of some sense into the heads of the army medical
staff, and much disgusting and dangerous drudgery in the wards, when she
had the means to live comfortably at home doing nothing. John Ruskin
published accounts of how he had spent his comfortable income and what
work he had done, to shew that he, at least, was an honest worker and a
faithful administrator of the part of the national income that had fallen to his
lot. This was so little understood that people concluded that he must have
gone out of his mind; and as he afterwards did, like Dean Swift, succumb to
the melancholia and exasperation induced by the wickedness and stupidity
of capitalistic civilization, they joyfully persuaded themselves that they had
been quite right about him.
But when every possible qualification of the words Idle Rich has been
made, and it is fully understood that idle does not mean doing nothing
(which is impossible), but doing nothing useful, and continually consuming
without producing, the term applies to the class, numbering at the extreme
outside one-tenth of the population, to maintain whom in their idleness the
other nine-tenths are kept in a condition of slavery so complete that their
slavery is not even legalized as such: hunger keeps them sufficiently in

order without imposing on their masters any of those obligations which
make slaves so expensive to their owners. What is more, any attempt on the
part of a rich woman to do a stroke of ordinary work for the sake of her
health would be bitterly resented by the poor because, from their point of
view, she would be a rich woman meanly doing a poor woman out of a job.
And now comes the crowning irony of it all, which many intelligent women
to whom irony means nothing will prefer to call the judgment of God.
When we have conferred on these people the coveted privilege of having
plenty of money and nothing to do (our idiotic receipt for perfect happiness
and perfect freedom) we find that we have made them so wretched and
unhealthy that instead of doing nothing they are always doing something
“to keep themselves fit” for doing nothing; and instead of doing what they
like, they bind themselves to a laborious routine of what they call society
and pleasure which you could not impose on a parlormaid without receiving
notice instantly, or on a Trappist without driving him to turn atheist to
escape from it. Only one part of it, the Red Indian part, the frank return to
primitive life, the hunting and shooting and country life, is bearable; and
one has to be by nature half a savage to enjoy that continually. So much for
the exertions of the idle rich!

19
CHURCH, SCHOOL, AND PRESS

J
UST as Parliament and the Courts are captured by the rich, so is the
Church. The average parson does not teach honesty and equality in the
village school: he teaches deference to the merely rich, and calls that
loyalty and religion. He is the ally of the squire, who, as magistrate,
administers the laws made in the interests of the rich by the parliament of
rich men, and calls that justice. The villagers, having no experience of any
other sort of religion or law, soon lose all respect for both, and become
merely cynical. They may touch their hats and curtsey respectfully; but they
whisper to oneanother that the squire, no matter how kind his wife may be
at Christmas by way of ransom, is a despoiler and oppressor of the poor,
and the parson a hypocrite. In revolutions, it is the respectful peasants who
burn the country houses and parsonages, and rush to the cathedrals to
deface the statues, shatter the stained windows, and wreck the organ.
By the way, you may know parsons who are not like that. At least I do.
There are always men and women who will stand out against injustice, no
matter how prosperous and well-spoken-of it may be. But the result is that
they are ill-spoken-of themselves in the most influential quarters. Our
society must be judged, not by its few rebels, but by its millions of obedient
subjects.
The same corruption reaches the children in all our schools. Schoolmasters
who teach their pupils such vital elementary truths about their duty to their
country as that they should despise and pursue as criminals all able-bodied
adults who do not by personal service pull their weight in the social boat,
are dismissed from their employment, and sometimes prosecuted for
sedition. And from this elementary morality up to the most abstruse and
philosophic teaching in the universities, the same corruption extends.
Science becomes a propaganda of quack cures, manufactured by companies
in which the rich hold shares, for the diseases of the poor who need only
better food and sanitary houses, and of the rich who need only useful
occupation, to keep them both in health. Political economy becomes an

impudent demonstration that the wages of the poor cannot be raised; that
without the idle rich we should perish for lack of capital and employment;
and that if the poor would take care to have fewer children everything
would be for the best in the worst of all possible worlds.
Thus the poor are kept poor by their ignorance; and those whose parents are
too well-off to make it possible to keep them ignorant, and who receive
what is called a complete education, are taught so many flat lies that their
false knowledge is more dangerous than the untutored natural wit of
savages. We all blame the ex-Kaiser for banishing from the German schools
and universities all teachers who did not teach that history, science, and
religion all prove that the rule of the house of Hohenzollern: that is, of his
own rich family, is the highest form of government possible to mankind; but
we do the same thing ourselves, except that the worship of rich idleness in
general is substituted for the worship of the Hohenzollern family in
particular, though the Hohenzollerns have family traditions (including the
learning of a common craft by every man of them) which make them much
more responsible than any Tom or Dick who may happen to have made a
huge fortune in business.
As people get their opinions so largely from the newspapers they read, the
corruption of the schools would not matter so much if the Press were free.
But the Press is not free. As it costs at least quarter of a million of money to
establish a daily newspaper in London, the newspapers are owned by rich
men. And they depend on the advertisements of other rich men. Editors and
journalists who express opinions in print that are opposed to the interests of
the rich are dismissed and replaced by subservient ones. The newspapers
therefore must continue the work begun by the schools and colleges; so that
only the strongest and most independent and original minds can escape
from the mass of false doctrine that is impressed on them by the combined
and incessant suggestion and persuasion of Parliament, the law-courts, the
Church, the schools, and the Press. We are all brought up wrongheaded to
keep us willing slaves instead of rebellious ones.
What makes this so hard to discover and to believe is that the false teaching
is mixed up with a great deal of truth, because up to a certain point the
interests of the rich are the same as the interests of everybody else. It is only
where their interests differ from those of their neighbors that the deception
begins. For example, the rich dread railway accidents as much as the poor;

consequently the law on railway accidents, the sermons about railway
accidents, the school teaching about railway accidents, and the newspaper
articles about them are all quite honestly directed to the purpose of
preventing railway accidents. But when anyone suggests that there would
be fewer railway accidents if the railwaymen worked fewer hours and had
better wages, or that in the division of the railway fares between the
shareholders and the workers the shareholders should get less and the
workers more, or that railway travelling would be safer if the railways were
in the hands of the nation like the posts and the telegraphs, there is an
immediate outcry in the Press and in Parliament against such suggestions,
coupled with denunciations of those who make them as Bolsheviks or
whatever other epithet may be in fashion for the moment as a term of the
most infamous discredit.

20
WHY WE PUT UP WITH IT

Y
OU may ask why not only the rich but the poor put up with all this,
and even passionately defend it as an entirely beneficial public
morality. I can only say that the defence is not unanimous: it is
always being attacked at one point or another by public-spirited reformers
and by persons whose wrongs are unbearable. But taking it in the lump I
should say that the evil of the corruption and falsification of law, religion,
education, and public opinion is so enormous that the minds of ordinary
people are unable to grasp it, whereas they easily and eagerly grasp the
petty benefits with which it is associated. The rich are very charitable: they
understand that they have to pay ransom for their riches. The simple and
decent village woman whose husband is a woodman or gardener or
gamekeeper, and whose daughters are being taught manners as domestic
servants in the country house, sees in the lord of the manor only a kind
gentleman who gives employment, and whose wife gives clothes and
blankets and little comforts for the sick, and presides over the Cottage
Hospital and all the little shows and sports and well-meant activities that
relieve the monotony of toil, and rob illness of some of its terrors. Even in
the towns, where the rich and poor do not know oneanother, the lavish
expenditure of the rich is always popular. It provides much that people
enjoy looking at and gossiping about. The tradesman is proud of having rich
customers, and the servant of serving in a rich house. At the public
entertainments of the rich there are cheap seats for the poor. Ordinary
thoughtless people like all this finery. They will read eagerly about it, and
look with interest at the pictures of it in the illustrated papers, whereas
when they read that the percentage of children dying under the age of five
years has risen or fallen, it means nothing to them but dry statistics which
make the paper dull. It is only when people learn to ask “Is this good for all
of us all the time as well as amusing to me for five minutes?” that they are
on the way to understand how one fashionably dressed woman may cost the
life of ten babies.

Even then it seems to them that the alternative to having the fashionably
dressed rich ladies is that all women are to be dowdy. They need not be
afraid. At present nine women out of ten are dowdy. With a reasonable
distribution of income every one of the ten could afford to look her best.
That no woman should have diamonds until all women have decent clothes
is a sensible rule, though it may not appeal to a woman who would like to
have diamonds herself and does not care a rap whether other women are
well-dressed or not. She may even derive a certain gratification from seeing
other women worse dressed than herself. But the inevitable end of that
littleness of mind, that secret satisfaction in the misfortunes of others which
the Germans call Schadenfreude (we have no word for it), is that sooner or
later a revolution breaks out as it did in Russia; the diamonds go to the
pawnbroker, who refuses to advance any money on them because nobody
can afford diamonds any longer; and the fine ladies have to wear old clothes
and cheaper and worse readymades until there is nothing left for them to
wear. Only, as this does not happen all at once, the thoughtless do not
believe that the police will ever let it come; and the littlehearted do not care
whether it comes or not, provided it does not come until they are dead.
Another thing that makes us cling to this lottery with huge money prizes is
the dream that we may become rich by some chance. We read of uncles in
Australia dying and leaving £100,000 to a laborer or a charwoman who
never knew of his existence. We hear of somebody no better off than
ourselves winning the Calcutta Sweep. Such dreams would be destroyed by
an equal distribution of income. And people cling all the more to dreams
when they are too poor even to back horses! They forget the million losses
in their longing for the one gain that the million unlucky ones have to pay
for.
Poor women who have too much natural good sense to indulge in these
gambler’s dreams often make sacrifices in the hope that education will
enable their sons to rise from the slough of poverty; and some men with an
exceptional degree of the particular sort of cleverness that wins scholarships
owe their promotion to their mothers. But exceptional cases, dazzling as
some of them are, hold out no hope to ordinary people; for the world
consists of ordinary people: indeed that is the meaning of the word ordinary.
The ordinary rich woman’s child and the ordinary poor woman’s child may
be born with equally able brains; but by the time they begin life as grown

men the rich woman’s son has acquired the speech, manners, personal
habits, culture, and instruction without which all the higher employments
are closed to him; whilst the poor woman’s son is not presentable enough to
get any job which brings him into contact with refined people. In this way a
great deal of the brain power of the country is wasted and spoiled; for
Nature does not care a rap for rich and poor. For instance, she does not give
everybody the ability to do managing work. Perhaps one in twenty is as far
as she goes. But she does not pick out the children of the rich to receive her
capricious gifts. If in every two hundred people there are only twenty rich,
her gift of management will fall to nine poor children and one rich one. But
if the rich can cultivate the gift and the poor cannot, then nine-tenths of the
nation’s natural supply of managing ability will be lost to it; and to make up
the deficiency many of the managing posts will be filled up by pigheaded
people only because they happen to have the habit of ordering poor people
about.

21
POSITIVE REASONS FOR EQUALITY

S
O far, we have not found one great national institution that escapes the
evil effects of a division of the people into rich and poor: that is, of
inequality of income. I could take you further; but we should only fare
worse. I could shew you how rich officers and poor soldiers and sailors
create disaffection in the army and navy; how disloyalty is rampant because
the relation between the royal family and the bulk of the nation is the
relation between one rich family and millions of poor ones; how what we
call peace is really a state of civil war between rich and poor conducted by
disastrous strikes; how envy and rebellion and class resentments are chronic
moral diseases with us. But if I attempted this you would presently exclaim
“Oh, for goodness’ sake dont tell me everything or we shall never have
done”. And you would be quite right. If I have not convinced you by this
time that there are overwhelming reasons of State against inequality of
income, I shall begin to think that you dislike me.
Besides, we must get on to the positive reasons for the Socialist plan of an
equal division. I am specially interested in it because it is my favorite plan.
You had therefore better watch me carefully to see that I play fairly when I
am helping you to examine what there is to be said for equality of income
over and above that there is to be said against inequality of income.
First, equal division is not only a possible plan, but one which has been
tested by long experience. The great bulk of the daily work of the civilized
world is done, and always has been done, and always must be done, by
bodies of persons receiving equal pay whether they are tall or short, fair or
dark, quick or slow, young or getting on in years, teetotallers or beer
drinkers, Protestants or Catholics, married or single, short tempered or
sweet tempered, pious or worldly: in short, without the slightest regard to
the differences that make one person unlike another. In every trade there is a
standard wage; in every public service there is a standard pay; and in every
profession the fees are fixed with a view to enable the man who follows the
profession to live according to a certain standard of respectability which is

the same for the whole profession. The pay of the policeman and soldier
and postman, the wages of the laborer and carpenter and mason, the salary
of the judge and the member of Parliament, may differ, some of them
getting less than a hundred a year and others five thousand; but all the
soldiers get the same, all the judges get the same, all the members of
Parliament get the same; and if you ask a doctor why his fee is half a crown
or five shillings, or a guinea or three guineas, or whatever it may be, instead
of five shillings or ten shillings, or two guineas or six guineas or a thousand
guineas, he can give you no better reason than that he is asking what all the
other doctors ask, and that they ask it because they find they cannot keep up
their position on less.
Therefore when some inconsiderate person repeats like a parrot that if you
gave everybody the same money, before a year was out you would have rich
and poor again just as before, all you have to do is to tell him to look round
him and see millions of people who get the same money and remain in the
same position all their lives without any such change taking place. The
cases in which poor men become rich are most exceptional; and though the
cases in which rich men become poor are commoner, they also are accidents
and not ordinary everyday circumstances. The rule is that workers of the
same rank and calling are paid alike, and that they neither sink below their
condition nor rise above it. No matter how unlike they are to oneanother,
you can pay one of them two and sixpence and the other half a crown with
the assurance that as they are put so they will stay, though here and there a
great rogue or a great genius may surprise you by becoming much richer or
much poorer than the rest. Jesus complained that he was poorer than the
foxes and birds, as they had their holes and nests whilst he had not a house
to shelter him; and Napoleon became an emperor; but we need take no more
account of such extraordinary persons in forming our general plan than a
maker of readymade clothes takes of giants and dwarfs in his price list. You
may with the utmost confidence take it as settled by practical experience
that if we could succeed in distributing income equally to all the inhabitants
of the country, there would be no more tendency on their part to divide into
rich and poor than there is at present for postmen to divide into beggars and
millionaires. The only novelty proposed is that the postmen should get as
much as the postmasters, and the postmasters no less than anybody else. If
we find, as we do, that it answers to give all judges the same income, and
all navy captains the same income, why should we go on giving judges five

times as much as navy captains? That is what the navy captain would like to
know; and if you tell him that if he were given as much as the judge he
would be just as poor as before at the end of a year he will use language
unfit for the ears of anyone but a pirate. So be careful how you say such
things.
Equal distribution is then quite possible and practicable, not only
momentarily but permanently. It is also simple and intelligible. It gets rid of
all squabbling as to how much each person should have. It is already in
operation and familiar over great masses of human beings. And it has the
tremendous advantage of securing promotion by merit for the more capable.

22
MERIT AND MONEY

T
HAT last sentence may puzzle even the most Intelligent Woman if she
has never before given her mind seriously to the subject; so I had
better enlarge on it a little.
Nothing hides the difference in merit between one person and another so
much as differences in income. Take for example a grateful nation making a
parliamentary grant of twenty thousand pounds to a great explorer, or a
great discoverer, or a great military commander (I have to make my
example a man: women get only statues after their death). Before he has
walked half way down the street on his way home to tell his wife about it he
may meet some notorious fool or scandalous libertine, or some quite
ordinary character, who has not merely twenty thousand pounds but twenty
thousand a year or more. The great man’s twenty thousand pounds will
bring him in only a thousand a year; and with this he finds himself in our
society regarded as “a poor devil” by tradesmen and financiers and quacks
who are ten times as rich because they have never in their lives done
anything but make money for themselves with entire selfishness, possibly
by trading in the vices or on the credulity of their fellow-countrymen. It is a
monstrous thing that a man who, by exercising a low sort of cunning, has
managed to grab three or four millions of money selling bad whiskey, or
forestalling the wheat harvest and selling it at three times its cost, or
providing silly newspapers and magazines for the circulation of lying
advertisements, should be honored and deferred to and waited on and
returned to Parliament and finally made a peer of the realm, whilst men
who have exercised their noblest faculties or risked their lives in the
furtherance of human knowledge and welfare should be belittled by the
contrast between their pence and the grabbers’ pounds.
Only where there is pecuniary equality can the distinction of merit stand
out. Titles, dignities, reputations do more harm than good if they can be
bought with money. Queen Victoria shewed her practical common sense
when she said that she would not give a title to anyone who had not money

enough to keep it up; but the result was that the titles went to the richest, not
to the best. Between persons of unequal income all other distinctions are
thrown into the background. The woman with a thousand a year inevitably
takes precedence of women with only a hundred, no matter how inferior she
may be to them; and she can give her children advantages qualifying them
for higher employments than those open to poor children of equal or greater
natural capacity.
Between persons of equal income there is no social distinction except the
distinction of merit. Money is nothing: character, conduct, and capacity are
everything. Instead of all the workers being levelled down to low wage
standards and all the rich levelled up to fashionable income standards,
everybody under a system of equal incomes would find her and his own
natural level. There would be great people and ordinary people and little
people; but the great would always be those who had done great things, and
never the idiots whose mothers had spoiled them and whose fathers had left
them a hundred thousand a year; and the little would be persons of small
minds and mean characters, and not poor persons who had never had a
chance. That is why idiots are always in favor of inequality of income (their
only chance of eminence), and the really great in favour of equality.

23
INCENTIVE

W
HEN we come to the objections to equal division of income we
find that most of them come to no more than this: that we are not
accustomed to it, and have taken unequal division between classes
so much for granted that we have never thought any other state of things
possible, not to mention that the teachers and preachers appointed for us by
the rich governing class have carefully hammered into us from our
childhood that it is wicked and foolish to question the right of some people
to be much better off than others.
Still, there are other objections. So many of them have been already
disposed of in our examination of the schemes for unequal distribution that
we need deal now with two only.
The first is that unless a woman were allowed to get more money than
another she would have no incentive to work harder.
One answer to this is that nobody wants her to work harder than another at
the national task. On the contrary, it is desirable that the burden of work,
without which there could be no income to divide, should be shared equally
by the workers. If those who are never happy unless they are working insist
on putting in extra work to please themselves, they must not pretend that
this is a painful sacrifice for which they should be paid; and, anyhow, they
can always work off their superfluous energy on their hobbies.
On the other hand, there are people who grudge every moment they have to
spend in working. That is no excuse for letting them off their share. Anyone
who does less than her share of work, and yet takes her full share of the
wealth produced by work, is a thief, and should be dealt with as any other
sort of thief is dealt with.
But Weary Willie may say that he hates work, and is quite willing to take
less, and be poor and dirty and ragged or even naked for the sake of getting
off with less work. But that, as we have seen, cannot be allowed: voluntary
poverty is just as mischievous socially as involuntary poverty: decent

nations must insist on their citizens leading decent lives, doing their full
share of the nation’s work, and taking their full share of its income. When
Weary Willie has done his bit he can be as lazy as he likes. He will have
plenty of leisure to lie on his back and listen to the birds, or watch his more
impetuous neighbors working furiously at their hobbies, which may be
sport, exploration, literature, the arts, the sciences, or any of the activities
which we pursue for their own sakes when our material needs are satisfied.
But poverty and social irresponsibility will be forbidden luxuries. Poor
Willie will have to submit, not to compulsory poverty as at present, but to
the compulsory well-being which he dreads still more.
However, there are mechanical difficulties in the way of freedom to work
more or less than others in general national production. Such work is not
nowadays separate individual work: it is organized associated work, carried
on in great factories and offices in which work begins and ends at fixed
hours. Our clothes, for instance, are mostly washed in steam laundries in
which all the operations which used to be performed by one woman with
her own tub, mangle, and ironing board are divided among groups of
women using machinery and buildings which none of them could use
single-handed even if she could afford to buy them, assisted by men
operating a steam power plant. If some of these women or men were to
offer to come an hour earlier or stay two hours later for extra wages the
reply would be that such an arrangement was impossible, as they could do
nothing without the co-operation of the rest. The machinery would not work
for them unless the engine was going. It is a case of all or nobody.
In short, associated work and factory work: that is to say, the sort of work
that makes it possible for our great modern civilized populations to exist,
would be impossible if every worker could begin when she liked and leave
off when she liked. In many factories the pace is set for the lazy and
energetic alike by the engine. The railway service would not be of much use
if the engine driver and the guard were to stop the train to look at a football
match when they felt inclined that way. Casual people are useless in modern
industry; and the other sort: those who want to work longer and harder than
the rest, find that they cannot do it except in comparatively solitary
occupations. Even in domestic service, where the difference between the
unpunctual slacker and sloven and the model servant is very perceptible, the
routine of the household keeps everybody up to a certain mark below which

a servant is discharged as unemployable. And the slacker neither accepts
lower wages nor can be cured by higher.
No external incentive is needed to make first-rate workers do the best work
they can: their trouble is that they can seldom make a living by it. First-rate
work is done at present under the greatest discouragement. There is the
impossibility of getting paid as much for it as for second-rate work. When it
is not paid for at all, there is the difficulty of finding leisure for it whilst
earning a living at common work. People seldom refuse a higher
employment which they feel capable of undertaking. When they do, it is
because the higher employment is so much worse paid or so unsuitable to
their social position that they cannot afford to take it. A typical case is that
of a non-commissioned officer in the army refusing a commission. If the
quartermaster-sergeant’s earnings and expenses came to no more than those
of the officer, and both men were of the same class, no inducement in the
way of extra money would be needed to make any soldier accept promotion
to the highest rank in which he felt he could do himself credit. When he
refuses, as he sometimes does, it is because he would be poorer and less at
home in the higher than in the lower rank.
But what about the dirty work? We are so accustomed to see dirty work
done by dirty and poorly paid people that we have come to think that it is
disgraceful to do it, and that unless a dirty and disgraced class existed it
would not be done at all. This is nonsense. Some of the dirtiest work in the
world is done by titled surgeons and physicians who are highly educated,
highly paid, and move in the best society. The nurses who assist them are
often their equals in general education, and sometimes their superiors in
rank. Nobody dreams of paying nurses less or respecting them less than
typists in city offices, whose work is much cleaner. Laboratory work and
anatomical work, which involves dissecting dead bodies, and analysing the
secretions and excretions of live ones, is sometimes revoltingly dirty from
the point of view of a tidy housekeeper; yet it has to be done by gentlemen
and ladies of the professional class. And every tidy housekeeper knows that
houses cannot be kept clean without dirty work. The bearing and nursing of
children are by no means elegant drawingroom amusements; but nobody
dares suggest that they are not in the highest degree honorable, nor do the
most fastidiously refined women shirk their turn when it comes.

It must be remembered too that a great deal of work which is now dirty
because it is done in a crude way by dirty people can be done in a clean way
by clean people. Ladies and gentlemen who attend to their own motor cars,
as many of them do, manage to do it with less mess and personal soiling
than a slovenly general servant will get herself into when laying a fire. On
the whole, the necessary work of the world can be done with no more dirt
than healthy people of all classes can stand. The truth of the matter is that it
is not really the work that is objected to so much as its association with
poverty and degradation. Thus a country gentleman does not object to drive
his car; but he would object very strongly to wear the livery of his
chauffeur; and a lady will tidy up a room without turning a hair, though she
would die rather than be seen in a parlormaid’s cap and apron, neat and
becoming as they are. These are as honorable as any other uniform, and
much more honorable than the finery of an idle woman: the parlormaids are
beginning to object to them only because they have been associated in the
past with a servile condition and a lack of respect to which parlormaids are
no longer disposed to submit. But they have no objection to the work. Both
the parlormaid and her employer (I dare not say her mistress), if they are
fond of flowers and animals, will grub in a garden all day, or wash dogs or
rid them of vermin with the greatest solicitude, without considering the dirt
involved in these jobs in the least derogatory to their dignity. If all dustmen
were dukes nobody would object to the dust: the dustmen would put little
pictures on their notepaper of their hats with flaps down the backs just as
now dukes put little pictures of their coronets; and everyone would be
proud to have a dustman to dinner if he would condescend to come. We
may take it that nobody objects to necessary work of any kind because of
the work itself; what everybody objects to is being seen doing something
that is usually done only by persons of lower rank or by colored slaves. We
sometimes even do things badly on purpose because those who do them
well are classed as our inferiors. For example, a foolish young gentleman of
property will write badly because clerks write well; and the ambassador of a
republic will wear trousers instead of knee-breeches and silk stockings at
court, because, though breeches and stockings are handsomer, they are a
livery; and republicans consider liveries servile.
Still, when we have put out of our heads a great deal of nonsense about
dirty work, the fact remains that though all useful work may be equally
honorable, all useful work is most certainly not equally agreeable or equally

exhausting. To escape facing this fact we may plead that some people have
such very queer tastes that it is almost impossible to mention an occupation
that you will not find somebody with a craze for. There is never any
difficulty in finding a willing hangman. There are men who are happy
keeping lighthouses on rocks in the sea so remote and dangerous that it is
often months before they can be relieved. And a lighthouse is at least
steady, whereas a lightship may never cease rolling about in a way that
would make most of us wish ourselves dead. Yet men are found to man
lightships for wages and pensions no better than they could find in good
employment on shore. Mining seems a horrible and unnatural occupation;
but it is not unpopular. Children left to themselves do the most
uncomfortable and unpleasant things to amuse themselves, very much as a
blackbeetle, though it has the run of the house, prefers the basement to the
drawingroom. The saying that God never made a job but He made a man or
woman to do it is true up to a certain point.
But when all possible allowances are made for these idiosyncrasies it
remains true that it is much easier to find a boy who wants to be a gardener
or an engine driver, and a girl who wants to be a film actress or a telephone
operator, than a boy who wants to be a sewerman, or a girl who wants to be
a ragpicker. A great deal can be done to make unpopular occupations more
agreeable; and some of them can be got rid of altogether, and would have
been got rid of long ago if there had been no class of very poor and rough
people to put them upon. Smoke and soot can be done away with; sculleries
can be made much pleasanter than most solicitors’ offices; the
unpleasantness of a sewerman’s work is already mostly imaginary; coal
mining may be put an end to by using the tides to produce electric power;
and there are many other ways in which work which is now repulsive can
be made no irksomer than the general run of necessary labor. But until this
happens all the people who have no particular fancy one way or the other
will want to do the pleasanter sorts of work.
Fortunately there is a way of equalizing the attraction of different
occupations. And this brings us to that very important part of our lives that
we call our leisure. Sailors call it their liberty.
There is one thing that we all desire; and that is freedom. By this we mean
freedom from any obligation to do anything except just what we like,
without a thought of tomorrow’s dinner or any other of the necessities that

make slaves of us. We are free only as long as we can say “My time is my
own”. When workers working ten hours a day agitate for an eight-hour day,
what they really want is not eight hours work instead of ten, but sixteen
hours off duty instead of fourteen. And out of this sixteen hours must come
eight hours sleep and a few hours for eating and drinking, dressing and
undressing, washing and resting; so that even with an eight hours working
day the real leisure of the workers: that is, the time they have after they are
properly rested and fed and cleaned up and ready for any adventures or
amusements or hobbies they care for, is no more than a few hours; and these
few are reduced in value by the shortness of daylight in winter, and cut
down by the time it takes to get into the country or wherever is the best
place to enjoy oneself. Married women, whose working place is the man’s
home, want to get away from home for recreation, just as men want to get
away from the places where they work; in fact a good deal of our domestic
quarrelling arises because the man wants to spend his leisure at home whilst
the woman wants to spend hers abroad. Women love hotels: men hate them.
Take, however, the case of a man and his wife who are agreed in liking to
spend their leisure away from home. Suppose the man’s working day is
eight hours, and that he spends eight hours in bed and four over his
breakfast, dinner, washing, dressing, and resting. It does not follow that he
can have four hours to spare for amusement with his wife every day. Their
spare four hours are more likely to be half wasted in waiting for the theatre
or picture show to begin; for they must leave the open air amusements,
tennis, golf, cycling, and the seaside, for the week-end or Bank Holiday.
Consequently he is always craving for more leisure. This is why we see
people preferring rough and strict employments which leave them some
time to themselves to much more gentle situations in which they are never
free. In a factory town it is often impossible to get a handy and intelligent
domestic servant, or indeed to get a servant at all. That is not because the
servant need work harder or put up with worse treatment than the factory
girl or the shop assistant, but because she has no time she can call her own.
She is always waiting on the doorbell even when you dare not ring the
drawingroom bell lest she should rush up and give notice. To induce her to
stay, you have to give her an evening out every fortnight; then one every
week; then an afternoon a week as well; then two afternoons a week; then
leave to entertain her friends in the drawingroom and use the piano
occasionally (at which times you must clear out of your own house); and

the end is that, long before you have come to the end of the concessions you
are expected to make, you discover that it is not worth keeping a servant at
all on such terms, and take to doing the housework yourself with modern
labor saving appliances. But even if you put up with the evenings out and
all the rest of it, the girl has still no satisfying sense of freedom; she may
not want to stay out all night even for the most innocent purposes; but she
wants to feel that she might if she liked. That is human nature.
We now see how we can make compensatory arrangements as between
people who do more or less agreeable and easy sorts of work. Give more
leisure, earlier retirement into the superannuated class, more holidays, in the
less agreeable employments, and they will be as much sought after as the
more agreeable ones with less leisure. In a picture gallery you will find a
nicely dressed lady sitting at a table with nothing to do but to tell anyone
who asks what is the price of any particular picture, and take an order for it
if one is given. She has many pleasant chats with journalists and artists; and
if she is bored she can read a novel. Her desk chair is comfortable; and she
takes care that it shall be near the stove. But the gallery has to be scrubbed
and dusted every day; and its windows have to be kept clean. It is clear that
the lady’s job is a much softer one than the charwoman’s. To balance them
you must either let them take their turns at the desk and at the scrubbing on
alternate days or weeks; or else, as a first-rate scrubber and duster and
cleaner might make a very bad business lady, and a very attractive business
lady might make a very bad scrubber, you must let the charwoman go home
and have the rest of the day to herself earlier than the lady at the desk.
Public picture galleries, in which the pictures are not sold, require the
services of guardians who have nothing to do but wear a respectable
uniform and see that people do not smoke nor steal the pictures, nor poke
umbrellas through them when pointing out their beauties. Compare this
work with that of the steel smelter, who has to exercise great muscular
strength among blast furnaces and pools of molten metal; that is to say, in
an atmosphere which to an unaccustomed person would seem the nearest
thing to hell on earth! It is true that the steel smelter would very soon get
bored with the gallery attendant’s job, and would go back to the furnaces
and the molten metal sooner than stick it; whilst the gallery attendant could
not do the steel smelter’s job at all, being too old, or too soft, or too lazy, or
all three combined. One is a young man’s job and the other an old man’s

job. We balance them at present by paying the steel smelter more wages.
But the same effect can be produced by giving him more leisure, either in
holidays or shorter hours. The workers do this themselves when they can.
When they are paid, not by time, but by the piece; and when through a rise
in prices or a great rush of orders they find that they can earn twice as much
in a week as they are accustomed to live on, they can choose between
double wages and double leisure. They usually choose double leisure,
taking home the same money as before, but working from Monday to
Wednesday only, and taking a Thursday to Saturday holiday. They do not
want more work and more money: they want more leisure for the same
work, which proves that money is not the only incentive to work, nor the
strongest. Leisure, or freedom, is stronger when the work is not pleasurable
in itself.

24
THE TYRANNY OF NATURE

T
HE very first lesson that should be taught us when we are old enough
to understand it is that complete freedom from the obligation to work
is unnatural, and ought to be illegal, as we can escape our share of the
burden of work only by throwing it on someone else’s shoulders. Nature
inexorably ordains that the human race shall perish of famine if it stops
working. We cannot escape from this tyranny. The question we have to
settle is how much leisure we can afford to allow ourselves. Even if we
must work like galley slaves whilst we are at it, how soon may we leave off
with a good conscience, knowing that we have done our share and may now
go free until tomorrow? That question has never been answered, and cannot
be answered under our system because so many of the workers are doing
work that is not merely useless but harmful. But if by an equal distribution
of income and a fair division of work we could find out the answer, then we
should think of our share of work as earning us, not so much money, but so
much freedom.
And another curious thing would happen. We now revolt against the slavery
of work because we feel ourselves to be the slaves, not of Nature and
Necessity, but of our employers and those for whom they have to employ
us. We therefore hate work and regard it as a curse. But if everyone shared
the burden and the reward equally, we should lose this feeling. Nobody
would feel put upon; and everybody would know that the more work was
done the more everybody would get, since the division of what the work
produced would be equal. We should then discover that haymaking is not
the only work that is enjoyable. Factory work, when it is not overdriven, is
very social and can be very jolly: that is one of the reasons why girls prefer
working in weaving sheds in a deafening din to sitting lonely in a kitchen.
Navvies have heavy work; but they are in the open air: they talk, fight,
gamble, and have plenty of change from place to place; and this is much
better fun than the sort of clerking that means only counting another man’s
money and writing it down in figures in a dingy office. Besides the work
that is enjoyable from its circumstances there is the work that is interesting

and enjoyable in itself, like the work of the philosophers and of the different
kinds of artists who will work for nothing rather than not work at all; but
this, under a system of equal division, would probably become a product of
leisure rather than of compulsory industry.
Now consider the so-called pleasures that are sold to us as more enjoyable
than work. The excursion train, the seaside lodgings, the catchpenny shows,
the drink, the childish excitement about football and cricket, the little bands
of desperately poor Follies and Pierrots pretending to be funny and cute
when they are only vulgar and silly, and all the rest of the attempts to
persuade the Intelligent Woman that she is having a glorious treat when she
is in fact being plundered and bored and tired out and sent home cross and
miserable: do not these shew that people will snatch at anything, however
uneasy, for the sake of change when their few whole days of leisure are
given to them at long intervals on Bank Holidays and the like? If they had
enough real leisure every day as well as work they would learn how to
enjoy themselves. At present they are duffers at this important art. All they
can do is to buy the alluringly advertized pleasures that are offered to them
for money. They seldom have sense enough to notice that these pleasures
have no pleasure in them, and are endured only as a relief from the
monotony of the daily leisureless drudgery.
When people have leisure enough to learn how to live, and to know the
difference between real and sham enjoyment, they will not only begin to
enjoy their work, but to understand why Sir George Cornewall Lewis said
that life would be tolerable but for its amusements. He was clever enough to
see that the amusements, instead of amusing him, wasted his time and his
money and spoiled his temper. Now there is nothing so disagreeable to a
healthy person as wasting time. See how healthy children pretend to be
doing something or making something until they are tired! Well, it would be
as natural for grown-up people to build real castles for the fun of it as for
children to build sand castles. When they are tired they do not want to work
at all, but just to do nothing until they fall asleep. We never want to work at
pleasure: what we want is work with some pleasure and interest in it to
occupy our time and exercise our muscles and minds. No slave can
understand this, because he is overworked and underrespected; and when he
can escape from work he rushes into gross and excessive vices that
correspond to his gross and excessive labor. Set him free, and he may never

be able to shake off his old horror of labor and his old vices; but never
mind: he and his generation will die out; and their sons and daughters will
be able to enjoy their freedom. And one way in which they will enjoy it will
be to put in a great deal of extra work for the sake of making useful things
beautiful and good things better, to say nothing of getting rid of bad things.
For the world is like a garden: it needs weeding as well as sowing. There is
use and pleasure in destruction as well as in construction: the one is as
necessary as the other.
To have a really precise understanding of this matter you must distinguish
not merely between labor and leisure but between leisure and rest. Labor is
doing what we must; leisure is doing what we like; rest is doing nothing
whilst our bodies and minds are recovering from their fatigue. Now doing
what we like is often as laborious as doing what we must. Suppose it takes
the form of running at the top of our speed to kick a ball up and down a
field! That is harder than many forms of necessary labor. Looking at other
people doing it is a way of resting, like reading a book instead of writing it.
If we all had a full share of leisure we could not spend the whole of it in
kicking balls, or whacking them about with golf clubs, or in shooting and
hunting. Much of it would be given to useful work; and though our
compulsory labor, neglect to perform which would be treated as a crime,
might possibly be reduced to two or three hours a day, we should add much
voluntary work to that in our leisure time, doing for fun a huge mass of
nationally beneficial work that we cannot get done at present for love or
money. Every woman whose husband is engaged in interesting work knows
the difficulty of getting him away from it even to his meals; in fact, jealousy
of a man’s work sometimes causes serious domestic unhappiness; and the
same thing occurs when a woman takes up some absorbing pursuit, and
finds it and its associations more interesting than her husband’s company
and conversation and friends. In the professions where the work is solitary
and independent of office and factory hours and steam engines, the number
of people who injure their health and even kill themselves prematurely by
overwork is so considerable that the philosopher Herbert Spencer never
missed an opportunity of warning people against the craze for work. It can
get hold of us exactly as the craze for drink can. Its victims go on working
long after they are so worn out that their operations are doing more harm
than good.

25
THE POPULATION QUESTION

T
HE second of the two stock objections to equal division of income is
that its benefits, if any, would soon be swallowed up by married
couples having too many children. The people who say this always
declare at the same time that our existing poverty is caused by there being
already too many people in the world, or, to put it the other way round, that
the world is too small to produce food enough for all the people in it.
Now even if this were true, it would be no objection to an equal division of
income; for the less we have, the more important it is that it should be
equally divided, so as to make it go as far as possible, and avoid adding the
evils of inequality to those of scarcity. But it is not true. What is true is that
the more civilized people there are in the world the poorer most of them are
relatively; but the plain cause of this is that the wealth they produce and the
leisure they provide for are so unequally divided between them that at least
half of them are living parasitically on the other half instead of producing
maintenance for themselves.
Consider the case of domestic servants. Most people who can afford to keep
a servant keep one only; but in Mayfair a young couple moving in the
richest society cannot get on without nine servants, even before they have
any children to be attended to. Yet everyone knows that the couples who
have only one servant, or at most two (to say nothing of those who have
none), are better attended to and more comfortable in their homes than the
unfortunate young people who have to find room for nine grown-up persons
downstairs, and keep the peace between them.
The truth is, of course, that the nine servants are attending mostly to one
another and not to their employers. If you must have a butler and footman
because it is the fashion, you must have somebody to cook their meals and
make their beds. Housekeepers and ladies’ maids need domestic service as
much as the lady of the house, and are much more particular about not
putting their hands to anything that is not strictly their business. It is
therefore a mistake to say that nine servants are ridiculous with only two

people to be attended. There are eleven people in the house to be attended;
and as nine of them have to do all this attendance between them, there is not
so much to spare for the odd two as might be imagined. That is why couples
with nine servants are continually complaining of the difficulty of getting
on with so few, and supplementing them with charwomen and jobbing
dressmakers and errand boys. Families of ordinary size and extraordinary
income find themselves accumulating thirty servants; and as the thirty are
all more or less waiting on oneanother there is no limit except that of
sleeping room to the number wanted; the more servants you have, the less
time they have to attend to you, and therefore, the more you need, or rather
the more they need, which is much jollier for them than for you.
Now it is plain that these hordes of servants are not supporting themselves.
They are supported by their employer; and if he is an idle rich man living
on rents and dividends: that is, being supported by the labor of his tenants
and of the workers in the companies in which he has shares, then the whole
establishment, servants, employer and all, is not self-supporting, and would
not be even if the world were made ten times as large as it is to
accommodate them. Instead of too many people in the world there are too
many idlers, and much too many workers wasting their time in attending to
idlers. Get rid of the idlers, and set these workers to useful work, and we
shall hear no more for a long time yet about the world being overcrowded.
Perhaps we shall never hear of it again. Nature has a way with her in these
matters.
Some people will find it easier to understand this if I put it to them like a
sum in arithmetic. Suppose 20 men are producing by their labor £100 a year
each, and they agree, or are forced by law, to give up £50 of it to the owner
of the estate on which they work. The owner will receive £1000 a year, not
for work, but for owning. The owner can afford to spend £500 a year on
himself, which makes him ten times as rich as any of the twenty workers,
and use the other £500 to hire six men and a boy at £75 a year each to wait
on him as servants and act as an armed force to deal with any of the twenty
men who may attempt to rebel and withhold the £50 from him. The six men
will not take the part of the men with £50 a year because they themselves
get £75; and they are not clever enough to see that if they all joined to get
rid of the owner and do useful work, they could have £100 a year apiece.

You have only to multiply the twenty workers and the six or seven retainers
by millions to get the ground plan of what exists in every country where
there is a class of owners, with a great police force and an army to protect
their property, great numbers of servants to wait on them, and masses of
workers making luxuries for them, all supported by the labor of the really
useful workers who have to support themselves as well. Whether an
increase of population will make the country richer or poorer depends, not
on the natural fruitfulness of the earth, but on whether the additional people
are set to do useful work or not. If they are, then the country will be richer.
If, however, the additional people are set to work unproductively for the
property owners as servants, or armed guardians of the rights of property, or
in any of the other callings and professions to minister only to the owners,
then the country will be poorer, though the property owners may become
richer, the display of diamonds and fine dresses and cars much more
splendid, and the servants and other retainers receiving higher wages and
more schooling than their grandfathers.
In the natural course of things the more people there are in a country the
richer it ought to be, because of the advantage of division of labor. Division
of labor means that instead of every man having to do everything for
himself like Robinson Crusoe, the different sorts of work are done by
different sets of men, who become very quick and skilful at their job by
doing nothing else. Also their work can be directed by others who give their
whole minds to directing it. The time saved in this way can be used in
making machinery, roads, and all sorts of contrivances for saving more time
and labor later on. That is how twenty workers can produce more than twice
what ten can produce, and a hundred much more than five times what
twenty can produce. If wealth and the labor of producing it were equally
shared, a population of a hundred would be much better off than a
population of ten, and so on up to modern populations of millions, which
ought to be enormously better off than the old communities of thousands.
The fact that they are either very little better off or sometimes actually
worse off, is due wholly to the idlers and idlers’ parasites who are
plundering them as we plunder the poor bees.
I must not, however, let you believe that if we all shared equally the
increase of wealth per head could go on for ever. Human beings can
multiply very fast under favorable conditions. A single pair, if their

posterity managed their affairs well enough to avoid war, pestilence, and
premature death, might have twenty million descendants alive at the end of
four hundred years. If all the couples now alive were to multiply at that rate
there would soon not be standing room on the earth, much less fields to
grow wheat in. There is a limit to the quantity of food the earth can yield to
labor; and if there were no limit to the increase of population we should at
last find that instead of increasing our shares of food by breeding more
human beings, we should diminish them.
Though we now cultivate the skies by extracting nitrogen from the air, other
considerations than that of food will check our multiplication. Man does not
live by bread alone; and it is possible for people to be overfed and
overcrowded at the same time. After the war there was no exceptional
scarcity of food in England; but there was a terrible scarcity of houses. Our
cities are monstrously overcrowded: to provide every family they contain
with a comfortably spacious house and garden some of our streets would
have to be spread over miles of country. Some day we may have to make up
our minds how many people we need to keep us all healthy, and stick to that
number until we see reason to change it.
In this matter the women who have to bear the children must be considered.
It is possible for a woman to bear twenty children. In certain country
districts in Europe families of fifteen are not uncommon enough to be
regarded as extraordinary. But though a properly cared-for woman of
vigorous constitution, with her confinements reasonably spaced out, can
apparently stand this strain without permanent disablement or damage, and
remain as well and strong as women who have borne no children at all, yet
the bearing of each child involves a long period of discomfort and sickness,
culminating in temporary disablement, severe pain, and a risk of death. The
father escapes this; but at present he has to earn wages to support the
children while they are growing; and though there may be plenty of
employment for them when they come to working age, that does not
provide any bread and butter for them in the meantime. Consequently an
increase of population that benefits the country and the world may be an
almost unbearable burden to the parents. They therefore restrict their
families to the number the father can afford, or the mother cares to bear,
except when they do not know how this can be done, or are forbidden by
their religion to practise birth control.

This has a very important bearing on the equal distribution of income. To
understand this I must go back a little, and seem to change the subject; but
the connexion will soon be plain.
If the workers in all occupations are to receive the same income, how are
we to deal with the fact that though the cost of living is the same for all
workers, whether they are philosophers or farm hands, the cost of their
work varies very greatly. A woman in the course of a day’s work may use
up a reel of cotton costing a few pence whilst her husband, if a scientific
worker, may require some radium, which costs £16,000 an ounce. The
gunners on the battle-fields in Flanders, working at a dreadful risk of life
and limb, needed very little money for themselves; but the cost of the
materials they used up in a single day was prodigious. If they had had to
pay on the nail, out of their wages, for the cannons they wore out and the
shells they fired, there would have been no war.
This inequality of expense cannot be got over by any sort of adjustment of
leisure or holidays or privileges of any sort between worker and worker.
Still less can it be met by unequal wages. Even the maddest upholder of our
wage system will not propose that the man who works a steam hammer
costing many thousands of pounds should have wages proportionately
higher than the wages of the navvy who swings a sledgehammer or the
woodcutter who wields a beetle costing shillings instead of thousands of
pounds. The worker cannot bear the cost of his materials and implements if
he is to have only an equal share of the national income: he must either be
supplied with them, or repaid for them in the cases in which he has to
supply them at his own cost.
Applying this to the labor of child-bearing and the cost of supporting
children, it is clear that the expenses of both should not be borne by the
parents. At present they are repaid very insufficiently by maternity benefits
and by an allowance off income tax for each child in the family. Under a
system of equal division of income each child would be entitled to its share
from birth; and the parents would be the trustees for the children, subject,
no doubt, to the obligation of satisfying the Public Trustee, if any neglect
were reported, that the children were getting the full benefit of their
incomes. In this way a family of growing children would always be in easy
circumstances; and the mother could face the labor and risk of bearing them
for the sake of motherhood’s natural privileges, dignities, and satisfaction.

But it is conceivable that such pleasant conditions, combined with early
marriages and the disappearance of the present terrible infant mortality,
would lead to a greater increase of population than might seem desirable,
or, what is equally inconvenient, a faster increase; for the pace of the
increase is very important: it might be desirable to double the population in
a hundred years and very undesirable to double it in fifty. Thus it may
become necessary to control our numbers purposely in new ways.
What are the present ways? How is the population kept down to the
numbers our system of unequal sharing can support? They are mostly very
dreadful and wicked ways. They include war, pestilence, and poverty that
causes multitudes of children to die of bad feeding and clothing and
housing before they are a year old. Operating side by side with these
horrors, we have the practice of artificial birth control by the parents on
such an enormous scale that among the educated classes which resort to it,
including the skilled artisan class, population is actually decreasing
seriously. In France the Government, dreading a dearth of soldiers, urges
the people to have more children to make up a deficiency of twenty millions
as compared with Germany. To such restrictions on population must be
added the criminal practice of abortion, which is terribly prevalent, and, in
eastern countries, the more straightforward custom of frank infanticide by
literally throwing away the unwanted child, especially the female child, and
leaving it to perish of exposure. The humane Mahomet could not convince
the Arabs that this was sinful; but he told them that on the Day of Judgment
the female child that was exposed would rise up and ask “What fault did I
commit?” In spite of Mahomet children are still exposed in Asia; and when
exposure is effectually prevented by law as it is in nominally Christian
countries, the unwanted children die in such numbers from neglect,
starvation, and ill-usage, that they, too, may well ask on the Day of
Judgment “Would it not have been kinder to expose us?”
Of all these methods of keeping down the population there can be no doubt
that artificial birth control: that is, the prevention of conception, is the most
humane and civilized, and by far the least demoralizing. Bishops and
cardinals have denounced it as sinful; but their authority in the matter is
shaken by their subjection to the tradition of the early Christians, for whom
there was no population question. They believed also that marriage is sinful
in itself, whether conception be prevented or not. Thus our Churchmen are

obliged to start by assuming that sex is a curse imposed on us by the
original sin of Eve. But we do not get rid of a fact by calling it a curse and
trying to ignore it. We must face it with one eye on the alternatives to birth
control, and the other on the realities of our sexual nature. The practical
question for the mass of mankind is not whether the population shall be
kept down or not, but whether it shall be kept down by preventing the
conception of children or by bringing them into the world and then
slaughtering them by abortion, exposure, starvation, neglect, ill-usage,
plague, pestilence and famine, battle, murder and sudden death. I defy any
bishop or cardinal to choose the latter alternatives. St Paul abhorred
marriage; but he said “Better marry than burn”. Our bishops and cardinals
may abhor contraception (so do I, by the way); but which of them would
not say, when put to it like St Paul, “Better have no children, by whatever
means, than have them and kill them as we are killing them at present”.
We have seen how our present unequal sharing of the national income has
forced this question of Birth Control prematurely on us whilst there is still
plenty of room left in the world. Canada and Australia seem
underpopulated; but the Australians say that their waste spaces are
uninhabitable, though the overcrowded Japanese are restrained only by our
military prestige from saying “Well, if you will not inhabit them, we will”.
We have birth control even where the Churches struggle hardest against it.
The only thing that can check it is the abolition of the artificial poverty that
has produced it prematurely. As equal division of income can do this, those
who dislike birth control and would defer it to the latest possible moment,
have that reason as well as all the others we have studied, for advocating
equal division.
When the last possible moment comes, nobody can foresee how the
necessary restriction of the population will be effected. It may be that
Nature will interfere and take the matter out of our hands. This possibility is
suggested by the fact that the number of children born seems to vary
according to the need for them. When they are exposed to such dangers and
hard conditions that very few of them can be expected to survive, Nature,
without any artificial interference, produces enormous numbers to provide
against the complete extinction of the species. We have all heard of the
codfish with its million eggs and of the queen bee laying four thousand eggs
a day. Human beings are less prolific; but even within human limits Nature

apparently distinguishes between poor, undernourished, uncultivated,
defective people whose children die early and in great numbers, and people
who are fully cultivated mentally and physically. The defectives are
appallingly prolific: the others have fewer children even when they do not
practise birth control. It is one of the troubles of our present civilization that
the inferior stocks are outbreeding the superior ones. But the inferior stocks
are really starved stocks, slum stocks, stocks not merely uncultivated but
degraded by their wretched circumstances. By getting rid of poverty we
should get rid of these circumstances and of the inferior stocks they
produce; and it is not at all unlikely that in doing so we should get rid of the
exaggerated fertility by which Nature tries to set off the terrible infant
mortality among them.
For if Nature can and does increase fertility to prevent the extinction of a
species by excessive mortality, need we doubt that she can and will
decrease it to prevent its extinction by overcrowding? It is certain that she
does, in a mysterious way, respond to our necessities, or rather to her own.
But her way is one that we do not understand. The people who say that if
we improve the condition of the world it will be overpopulated are only
pretending to understand it. If the Socialists were to say positively that
Nature will keep the population within bounds under Socialism without
artificial birth control, they would be equally pretending to understand it.
The sensible course is to improve the condition of the world and see what
will happen, or, as some would say, trust in God that evil will not come out
of good. All that concerns us at present is that as the overpopulation
difficulty has not yet arisen except in the artificial form produced by our
unequal distribution of income, and curable by a better distribution, it
would be ridiculous to refrain from making ourselves more comfortable on
the ground that we may find ourselves getting uncomfortable again later on.
We should never do anything at all if we listened to the people who tell us
that the sun is cooling, or the end of the world coming next year, or the
increase of population going to eat us off the face of the earth, or, generally,
that all is vanity and vexation of spirit. It would be quite sensible to say
“Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we die” if only we were certain about
tomorrow; but it would be foolish anyhow to say “It is not worth while to
live today; for we shall die tomorrow”. It is just like saying “It will be all
the same a thousand years hence” as lazy people do when they have
neglected their duties. The fact is that the earth can accommodate its present

population more comfortably than it does or ever did; and whilst we last we
may as well make ourselves as comfortable as we can.
Note that as long as two persons can produce more than twice as much as
one, and two million very much more than twice as much as one million,
the earth is said by the political economists to be under the Law of
Increasing Return. And if ever we reach a point when there will be more
people than the earth can feed properly, and the next child born will make
the whole world poorer, then the earth will be under the Law of
Diminishing Return. If any gentleman tries to persuade you that the earth is
now under the Law of Diminishing Return you may safely conclude that he
has been told to say so at a university for the sons of the rich, who would
like you to believe that their riches, and the poverty of the rest, are brought
about by an eternal and unchangeable law of Nature instead of by an
artificial and disastrous misdistribution of the national income which we
can remedy.
All the same, do not overlook the fact that there may be overpopulation in
spots whilst the world as a whole is underpopulated. A boat in mid ocean,
containing ten castaways, a pint of water, and a pound of biscuits, is terribly
overpopulated. The cottage of a laborer with thirty shillings a week and
eight children is overpopulated. A tenement house with twelve rooms and
fifty people living in them is overpopulated. London is abominably
overpopulated. Therefore, though there is no world population question, and
the world is under the law of increasing return, there are innumerable spots
in the world which are overpopulated and under the law of diminishing
return. Equality of income would enable the unfortunate denizens of these
plague spots to escape from the slavery of diminishing returns to the
prosperity of increasing returns.

26
THE DIAGNOSTIC OF SOCIALISM

W
E have now disposed of the only common objections to equal
division of income not dealt with in our earlier examination of the
various ways in which income is or might be unequally divided.
And we have done the whole business without bothering over what the
Socialists say, or quoting any of their books. You see how any intelligent
woman, sitting down to decide for herself how the national income should
be distributed, and without having ever heard the word Socialism or read a
line by any Socialist writer, may be driven by her own common sense and
knowledge of the world to the conclusion that the equal plan is the only
permanent and prosperous one possible in a free community. If you could
find a better way out of our present confusion and misery for us, you would
be hailed as one of the greatest of discoverers.
“And if I cannot,” you will say, “I suppose you will tell me I must join the
Socialists!”
Dear lady: have you ever read St Augustine? If you have, you will
remember that he had to admit that the early Christians were a very mixed
lot, and that some of them were more addicted to blackening their wives’
eyes for tempting them, and wrecking the temples of the pagans, than to
carrying out the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount. Indeed you must
have noticed that we modern Christians are still a very mixed lot, and that it
is necessary to hang a certain number of us every year for our country’s
good. Now I will be as frank as St Augustine, and admit that the professed
Socialists are also a very mixed lot, and that if joining them meant inviting
them indiscriminately to tea I should strongly advise you not to do it, as
they are just like other people, which means that some of them steal spoons
when they get the chance. The nice ones are very nice; the general run are
no worse than their neighbors; and the undesirable ones include some of the
most thoroughpaced rascals you could meet anywhere. But what better can
you expect from any political party you could join? You are, I hope, on the
side of the angels; but you cannot join them until you die; and in the

meantime you must put up with mere Conservatives, Liberals, Socialists,
Protestants, Catholics, Dissenters, and other groups of mortal women and
men, very mixed lots all of them, so that when you join them you have to
pick your company just as carefully as if they had no labels and were entire
strangers to you. Carlyle lumped them all as mostly fools; and who can
deny that, on the whole, they deserve it?
But, after all, you are an Intelligent Woman, and know this as well as I do.
What you may be a little less prepared for is that there are a great many
people who call themselves Socialists who do not clearly and thoroughly
know what Socialism is, and would be shocked and horrified if you told
them that you were in favor of dividing-up the income of the country
equally between everybody, making no distinction between lords and
laborers, babies in arms and able-bodied adults, drunkards and teetotallers,
archbishops and sextons, sinners and saints. They would assure you that all
this is a mere ignorant delusion of the man in the street, and that no
educated Socialist believes such crazy nonsense. What they want, they will
tell you, is equality of opportunity, by which I suppose they mean that
Capitalism will not matter if everyone has an equal opportunity of
becoming a Capitalist, though how that equality of opportunity can be
established without equality of income they cannot explain. Equality of
opportunity is impossible. Give your son a fountain pen and a ream of
paper, and tell him that he now has an equal opportunity with me of writing
plays, and see what he will say to you! Do not let yourself be deceived by
such phrases, or by protestations that you need not fear Socialism because it
does not really mean Socialism. It does; and Socialism means equality of
income and nothing else. The other things are only its conditions or its
consequences.
You may, if you have a taste that way, read all the books that have been
written to explain Socialism. You can study the Utopian Socialism of Sir
Thomas More, the Theocratic Socialism of the Incas, the speculations of
Saint Simon, the Communism of Fourier and Robert Owen, the so-called
Scientific Socialism of Karl Marx, the Christian Socialism of Canon
Kingsley and the Rev. F. D. Maurice, William Morris’s News from
Nowhere (a masterpiece of literary art which you should read anyhow), the
Constitutional Socialism of Sidney and Beatrice Webb and of the highly
respectable Fabian Society, and several fancy Socialisms preached by

young men who have not yet had time to become celebrated. But clever as
they all are, if they do not mean equality of income they mean nothing that
will save civilization. The rule that subsistence comes first and virtue
afterwards is as old as Aristotle and as new as this book. The Communism
of Christ, of Plato, and of the great religious orders, all take equality in
material subsistence for granted as the first condition of establishing the
Kingdom of Heaven on earth. Whoever has reached this conclusion, by
whatever path, is a Socialist; and whoever has not reached it is no Socialist,
though he or she may profess Socialism or Communism in passionate
harangues from one end of the country to the other, and even suffer
martyrdom for it.
So now you know, whether you agree with it or not, exactly what Socialism
is, and why it is advocated so widely by thoughtful and experienced people
in all classes. Also, you can distinguish between the genuine Socialists, and
the curious collection of Anarchists, Syndicalists, Nationalists, Radicals,
and malcontents of all sorts who are ignorantly classed as Socialists or
Communists or Bolshevists because they are all hostile to the existing state
of things, as well as the professional politicians, or Careerists, who are
deserting Liberalism for Labor because they think the Liberal ship is
sinking. And you are qualified to take at its proper value the nonsense that
is talked and written every day by anti-Socialist politicians and journalists
who have never given five minutes serious thought to the subject, and who
trot round imaginary Bolshies as boys trot round Guys on the fifth of
November.

27
PERSONAL RIGHTEOUSNESS

A
ND now that you know what Socialism is, let me give you a
warning, with an apology in advance if the warning is unnecessary.
English people, especially English ladies, are so individualistically
brought up that the moment they are convinced that anything is right they
are apt to announce that they are going to begin practising it at once, and to
order their children and servants to do the same. I have known women of
exceptional natural intelligence and energy who believed firmly that the
world can be made good by independent displays of coercive personal
righteousness. When they became convinced of the righteousness of
equality, they proceeded to do ridiculous things like commanding their
servants to take their meals with the family (forgetting that the servants had
not bargained for their intimacy and might strongly object to it), with
Heaven knows what other foolishness, until the servants gave notice, and
their husbands threatened to run away, and sometimes even did.
It is perhaps natural that ignorant poor women should imagine that
inequality is the fault of the rich women. What is more surprising is that
many rich women, though they ought to know better than anybody that a
woman can no more help being born rich than born poor, feel guilty and
ashamed of their wealth, and plunge into almsgiving to relieve their sickly
consciences. They often conceive Socialism as a charitable enterprise for
the benefit of the poor. Nothing could be further from the truth. Socialism
abhors poverty, and would abolish the poor. A hearty dislike and
disapproval of poor people as such is the first qualification of a good
Equalizer. Under Socialism people would be prosecuted for being poor as
they are now for being naked. Socialism loathes almsgiving, not only
sentimentally because it fills the paupers with humiliation, the patrons with
evil pride, and both with hatred, but because in a country justly and
providently managed there could be neither excuse for it on the pauper’s
part nor occasion for it on the patron’s. Those who like playing the good
Samaritan should remember that you cannot have good Samaritans without
thieves. Saviors and rescuers may be splendid figures in hagiography and

romance; but as they could not exist without sinners and victims they are
bad symptoms.
The virtues that feed on suffering are very questionable virtues. There are
people who positively wallow in hospitals and charitable societies and
Relief Funds and the like, yet who, if the need for their charitable exercises
were removed, could spend their energy to great advantage in improving
their own manners and learning to mind their own business. There will
always be plenty of need in the world for kindness; but it should not be
wasted on preventible starvation and disease. Keeping such horrors in
existence for the sake of exercising our sympathies is like setting our
houses on fire to exercise the vigor and daring of our fire brigades. It is the
people who hate poverty, not those who sympathize with it, who will put an
end to it. Almsgiving, though it cannot be stopped at present, as without it
we should have hunger riots, and possibly revolution, is an evil. At present
we give the unemployed a dole to support them, not for love of them, but
because if we left them to starve they would begin by breaking our
windows and end by looting our shops and burning our houses.
It is true that a third of the money has come directly out of their own
pockets; but the way in which it is repaid to them is none the less
demoralizing. They find out that whether they contribute or not, the rich
will pay ransom all the same. In ancient Rome the unemployed demanded
not only bread to feed them but gladiator shows to keep them amused
(panem et circenses); and the result was that Rome became crowded with
playboys who would not work at all, and were fed and amused with money
taken from the provinces. That was the beginning of the end of ancient
Rome. We may come to bread and football (or prize-fights) yet: indeed the
dole has brought us to the bread already. There is not even the blessing of
kindness on it; for we all grudge the dole (it comes out of all our pockets)
and would stop it tomorrow if we dared.
Equalization of Income will be brought about, not by every woman making
it her private business, but by every woman making it her public business:
that is, by law. And it will not be by a single law, but a long series of laws.
These laws will not be commandments saying thou shalt or thou shalt not.
The Ten Commandments gave the Israelites a set of precepts which none of
their laws were to violate; but the commandments were politically useless
until an elaborate set of laws and institutions had been provided to give

effect to them. The first and last commandment of Socialism is “Thou shalt
not have a greater or less income than thy neighbor”; but before such a
commandment can be even approximately obeyed we shall have not only to
pass hundreds of new Acts of Parliament and repeal hundreds of old ones,
but to invent and organize new Government departments; train and employ
no end of women and men as public servants; educate children to look at
their country’s affairs in a new way; and struggle at every step with the
opposition of ignorance, stupidity, custom, prejudice, and the vested
interests of the rich.
Imagine a Socialist Government elected by an overwhelming majority of
people who have read the preceding chapters of this book and been
convinced by them, but not otherwise prepared for any change. Imagine it
confronted with a starving woman. The woman says “I want work, not
charity”. The Government, not having any work for her, replies “Read
Shaw; and you will understand all about it”. The woman will say “I am too
hungry to read Shaw, even if I considered him an edifying author. Will you
please give me some food, and a job to enable me to pay for it honestly?”
What could the Government do but confess that it had no job to give her,
and offer her a dole, just as at present.
Until the Government has acquired all the powers of employment that the
private employers now possess, it can give nothing to starving women, but
outdoor relief with money taken by taxation from the employers and their
landlords and financiers, which is just what any unsocialist government
does. To acquire those powers it must itself become the national landlord,
the national financier, and the national employer. In other words, it cannot
distribute the national income equally until it, instead of the private owners,
has the national income to distribute. Until it has done so you cannot
practise Socialism even if you want to: you may even be severely punished
for trying. You may agitate and vote for all the steps by which equalization
of income will be reached; but in your private life you cannot do otherwise
than you have to do at present: that is, keep your social rank (know your
place, as it is called), paying or receiving the usual wages, investing your
money to the best advantage, and so forth.
You see, it is one thing to understand the aim of Socialism, and quite
another to carry it into practice, or even to see how it can or ever could be
carried into practice. Jesus tells you to take no thought for the morrow’s

dinner or dress. Matthew Arnold tells you to choose equality. But these are
commandments without laws. How can you possibly obey them at present?
To take no thought for the morrow as we now are is to become a tramp; and
nobody can persuade a really intelligent woman that the problems of
civilization can be solved by tramps. As to choosing equality, let us choose
it by all means; but how? A woman cannot go into the streets to rifle the
pockets of those who have more money than she has, and give money away
to those who have less: the police would soon stop that, and pass her on
from the prison cell to the lunatic asylum. She knows that there are things
that the Government may do by law that no private person could be allowed
to do. The Government may say to Mrs Jobson “If you murder Mrs Dobson
(or anyone else) you will be hanged”. But if Mrs Dobson’s husband said to
Mrs Jobson “If you murder my wife I will strangle you” he would be
threatening to commit a crime, and could be severely punished for it, no
matter how odious and dangerous Mrs Jobson might be. In America, crowds
sometimes take criminals out of the hands of the law and lynch them. If
they attempted to do that in England they would be dispersed by the police,
or shot down by the soldiers, no matter how wicked the criminal and how
natural their indignation at the crime.
The first thing civilized people have to learn politically is that they must not
take the law into their own hands. Socialism is from beginning to end a
matter of law. It will have to make idlers work; but it must not allow private
persons to take this obligation on themselves. For instance, an Intelligent
Woman, having to deal with a lazy slut, might feel strongly tempted to take
up the nearest broomstick and say “If you dont get on with your work and
do your fair share of it I will lambaste you with this stick until you are black
and blue”. That occasionally happens at present. But such a threat, and
much more its execution, is a worse crime than idleness, however richly the
slattern may deserve the thrashing. The remedy must be a legal remedy. If
the slattern is to be whacked it must be done by order of a court of law, by
an officer of the law, after a fair trial by law. Otherwise life would be
unbearable; for if we were all allowed to take the law into our own hands as
we pleased, no woman could walk down the street without risk of having
her hat torn off and stamped on by some æsthete who happened to think it
unbecoming, or her silk stockings tarred by some fanatic who considers
women’s legs indecent, not to mention mobs of such people.

Besides, the Intelligent Woman might not be stronger than the lazy one; and
in that case the lazy one might take the broomstick and whack the
intelligent one for working too hard and thereby causing more to be
expected from the lazy ones. That, also, has often been done by too zealous
Trade Unionists.
I need not labor this point any more. Should you become a convert to
Socialism you will not be committed to any change in your private life, nor
indeed will you find yourself able to make any change that would be of the
smallest use in that direction. The discussions in the papers as to whether a
Socialist Prime Minister should keep a motor car, or a Socialist playwright
receive fees for allowing his plays to be performed, or Socialist landlords
and capitalists charge rent for their land or interest on their capital, or a
Socialist of any sort refrain from selling all that she has and giving it to the
poor (quite the most mischievous thing she could possibly do with it), are
all disgraceful displays of ignorance not only of Socialism, but of common
civilization.

28
CAPITALISM

N
OBODY who does not understand Capitalism can change it into
Socialism, or have clear notions of how Socialism will work.
Therefore we shall have to study Capitalism as carefully as
Socialism. To begin with, the word Capitalism is misleading. The proper
name of our system is Proletarianism. When practically every disinterested
person who understands our system wants to put an end to it because it
wastes capital so monstrously that most of us are as poor as church mice, it
darkens counsel to call it Capitalism. It sets people thinking that Socialists
want to destroy capital, and believe that they could do without it: in short,
that they are worse fools than their neighbors.
Unfortunately that is exactly what the owners of the newspapers want you
to think about Socialists, whilst at the same time they would persuade you
that the British people are a free and independent race who would scorn to
be proletarians (except a few drunken rascals and Russians and professional
agitators): therefore they carefully avoid the obnoxious word Proletarianism
and stick to the flattering title of Capitalism, which suggests that the
capitalists are defending that necessary thing, Capital.
However, I must take names as I find them; and so must you. Let it be
understood between us, then, that when we say Capitalism we mean the
system by which the land of the country is in the hands, not of the nation,
but of private persons called landlords, who can prevent anyone from living
on it or using it except on their own terms. Lawyers tell you that there is no
such thing as private property in land because all the land belongs to the
King, and can legally be “resumed” by him at any moment. But as the King
never resumes it nowadays, and the freeholder can keep you off it, private
property in land is a fact in spite of the law.
The main advantage claimed for this arrangement is that it makes the
landholders rich enough to accumulate a fund of spare money called capital.
This fund is also private property. Consequently the entire industry of the
country, which could not exist without land and capital, is private property.

But as industry cannot exist without labor, the owners must for their own
sakes give employment to those who are not owners (called proletarians),
and must pay them enough wages to keep them alive and enable them to
marry and reproduce themselves, though not enough to enable them ever to
stop working regularly.
In this way, provided the owners make it their duty to be selfish, and always
hire labor at the lowest possible wage, the industry of the country will be
kept going, and the people provided with a continuous livelihood, yet kept
under a continuous necessity to go on working until they are worn out and
fit only for the workhouse. It is fully admitted, by those who understand this
system, that it produces enormous inequality of income, and that the
cheapening of labor which comes from increase of population must end in
an appalling spread of discontent, misery, crime, and disease, culminating
in violent rebellion, unless the population is checked at the point up to
which the owners can find employment for it; but the argument is that this
must be faced because human nature is so essentially selfish, and so
inaccessible to any motive except pecuniary gain, that no other practicable
way of building up a great modern civilization stands open to us.
This doctrine used to be called the doctrine of The Manchester School. But
as the name became unpopular, it is now described generally as Capitalism.
Capitalism therefore means that the only duty of the Government is to
maintain private property in land and capital, and to keep on foot an
efficient police force and magistracy to enforce all private contracts made
by individuals in pursuance of their own interests, besides, of course,
keeping civil order and providing for naval and military defence or
adventure.
In opposition to Capitalism, Socialism insists that the first duty of the
Government is to maintain equality of income, and absolutely denies any
private right of property whatever. It would treat every contract as one to
which the nation is a party, with the nation’s welfare as the predominant
consideration, and would not for a moment tolerate any contract the effect
of which would be that one woman should work herself to death
prematurely in degrading poverty in order that another should live idly and
extravagantly on her labor. Thus it is quite true that Socialism will abolish
private property and freedom of contract: indeed it has done so already to a
much greater extent than people realize; for the political struggle between

Capitalism and Socialism has been going on for a century past, during
which Capitalism has been yielding bit by bit to the public indignation
roused by its worst results, and accepting instalments of Socialism to
palliate them.
Do not, by the way, let yourself be confused by the common use of the term
private property to denote personal possession. The law distinguished
between Real Property (lordship) and Personal Property until the effort to
make a distinction between property in land and property in capital
produced such a muddle that it was dropped in 1926. Socialism, far from
absurdly objecting to personal possessions, knows them to be indispensable,
and looks forward to a great increase of them. But it is incompatible with
real property.
To make the distinction clear let me illustrate. You call your umbrella your
private property, and your dinner your private property. But they are not so:
you hold them on public conditions. You may not do as you please with
them. You may not hit me on the head with your umbrella; and you may not
put rat poison into your dinner and kill me with it, or even kill yourself; for
suicide is a crime in British law. Your right to the use and enjoyment of
your umbrella and dinner is a personal right, rigidly limited by public
considerations. But if you own an English or Scottish county you may drive
the inhabitants off it into the sea if they have nowhere else to go. You may
drag a sick woman with a newly born baby in her arms out of her house and
dump her in the snow on the public road for no better reason than that you
can make more money out of sheep and deer than out of women and men.
You may prevent a waterside village from building a steamboat pier for the
convenience of its trade because you think the pier would spoil the view
from your bedroom window, even though you never spend more than a
fortnight a year in that bedroom, and often do not come there for years
together. These are not fancy examples: they are things that have been done
again and again. They are much worse crimes than hitting me over the head
with your umbrella. And if you ask why landowners are allowed to do with
their land what you are not allowed to do with your umbrella, the reply is
that the land is private property, or, as the lawyers used to say, real property,
whilst the umbrella is only personal property. So you will not be surprised
to hear Socialists say that the sooner private property is done away with the
better.

Both Capitalism and Socialism claim that their object is the attainment of
the utmost possible welfare for mankind. It is in their practical postulates
for good government, their commandments if you like to call them so, that
they differ. These are, for Capitalism, the upholding of private property in
land and capital, the enforcement of private contracts, and no other State
interference with industry or business except to keep civil order; and, for
Socialism, the equalization of income, which involves the complete
substitution of personal for private property and of publicly regulated
contract for private contract, with police interference whenever equality is
threatened, and complete regulation and control of industry and its products
by the State.
As far as political theory is concerned you could hardly have a flatter
contradiction and opposition than this; and when you look at our Parliament
you do in fact see two opposed parties, the Conservative and the Labor,
representing roughly Capitalism and Socialism. But as members of
Parliament are not required to have had any political education, or indeed
any education at all, only a very few of them, who happen to have made a
special study, such as you are making, of social and political questions,
understand the principles their parties represent. Many of the Labor
members are not Socialists. Many of the Conservatives are feudal
aristocrats, called Tories, who are as keen on State interference with
everything and everybody as the Socialists. All of them are muddling along
from one difficulty to another, settling as best they can when they can put it
off no longer, rather than on any principle or system. The most you can say
is that, as far as the Conservative Party has a policy at all, it is a Capitalistic
policy, and as far as the Labor Party has a policy at all it is a Socialist
policy; so that if you wish to vote against Socialism you should vote
Conservative; and if you wish to vote against Capitalism you should vote
Labor. I put it in this way because it is not easy to induce people to take the
trouble to vote. We go to the polling station mostly to vote against
something instead of for anything.
We can now settle down to our examination of Capitalism as it comes to our
own doors. And, as we proceed, you must excuse the disadvantage I am at
in not knowing your private affairs. You may be a capitalist. You may be a
proletarian. You may be betwixt-and-between in the sense of having an
independent income sufficient to keep you, but not sufficient to enable you

to save any more capital. I shall have to treat you sometimes as if you were
so poor that the difference of a few shillings a ton in the price of coal is a
matter of serious importance in your housekeeping, and sometimes as if you
were so rich that your chief anxiety is how to invest the thousands you have
not been able to spend.
There is no need for you to remain equally in the dark about me; and you
had better know whom you are dealing with. I am a landlord and capitalist,
rich enough to be supertaxed; and in addition I have a special sort of
property called literary property, for the use of which I charge people
exactly as a landlord charges rent for his land. I object to inequality of
income not as a man with a small income, but as one with a middling big
one. But I know what it is to be a proletarian, and a poor one at that. I have
worked in an office; and I have pulled through years of professional
unemployment, some of the hardest of them at the expense of my mother. I
have known the extremes of failure and of success. The class in which I was
born was that most unlucky of all classes: the class that claims gentility and
is expected to keep up its appearances without more than the barest scrap
and remnant of property to do it on. I intrude these confidences on you
because it is as well that you be able to allow for my personal bias. The rich
often write about the poor, and the poor about the rich, without really
knowing what they are writing about. I know the whole gamut from
personal experience, short of actual hunger and homelessness, which should
never be experienced by anybody. If I cry sour grapes, you need not suspect
that they are only out of my reach: they are all in my hand at their ripest and
best.
So now let us come down to tin tacks.

29
YOUR SHOPPING

A
SK yourself this question: “Where does unequal distribution of the
national income hit me in my everyday life?”
The answer is equally plain and practical. When you go out to do
your marketing it hits you in every purchase you make. For every head of
cabbage you buy, every loaf of bread, every shoulder of mutton, every
bottle of beer, every ton of coals, every bus or tram fare, every theatre
ticket, every visit from your doctor or charwoman, every word of advice
from your lawyer, you have to pay not only what they cost, but an
additional charge which is handed over finally to people who have done
nothing whatever for you.
Now though every intelligent woman knows that she cannot expect to have
goods or services for less than they cost in education, materials, labor,
management, distribution, and so on, no intelligent woman will consent, if
she knows about it and can help it, to pay over and above this inevitable
cost for the luxuries and extravagances of idlers, especially if she finds
great difficulty in making both ends meet by working pretty hard herself.
To rid her of this overcharge, Socialists propose to secure goods for
everyone at cost price by nationalizing the industries which produce them.
This terrifies the idlers and their dependents so much that they do their best
to persuade the Intelligent Woman in their newspapers and speeches and
sermons that nationalization is an unnatural crime which must utterly ruin
the country. That is all nonsense. We have plenty of nationalization at
present; and nobody is any the worse for it. The army and navy, the civil
service, the posts and telegraphs and telephones, the roads and bridges, the
lighthouses and royal dockyards and arsenals, are all nationalized services;
and anyone declaring that they were unnatural crimes and were ruining the
country would be transferred to the county lunatic asylum, also a national
institution.

And we have much more nationalization than this in the form called
municipalization, the only difference being that instead of the central
Westminster Parliament owning and conducting the industry for the nation,
as it does the Post Office, the industry is owned and conducted by City
Corporations or County Councils for the local ratepayers. Thus we get
publicly owned electric light works, gas works, water works, trams, baths
and washhouses, public health services, libraries, picture galleries,
museums, lavatories, parks and piers with pavilions and bands and stages,
besides many other public services which concern the maintenance of the
Empire, and of which the public knows nothing.
Most of these things could be done by private companies and shops; indeed
many of them are done at present partly by private enterprise and partly by
public: for instance, in London private electric lighting companies supply
light in one district whilst the Borough Councils provide a municipal supply
in others. But the municipal supply is cheaper, and with honest and capable
management always must be cheaper than the private company’s supply.
You will ask, why must it? Well, shortly, because it pays less for its capital,
less for its management, and nothing at all for profits, this triple advantage
going to the consumer in cheapness. But to take in the whole scope of
public enterprise as compared with private, let us begin with the
nationalized services. Why is it that the nationalized Post Office is so much
cheaper and more extensive than a private letter-carrying company could
make it, that private letter-carrying is actually forbidden by law?
The reason is that the cost of carrying letters differs greatly as between one
letter and another. The cost of carrying a letter from house to house in the
same terrace is so small that it cannot be expressed in money: it is as near
nothing as does not matter: to get a figure at all you would have to take the
cost per thousand letters instead of per letter. But the cost of carrying the
same letter from the Isle of Wight to San Francisco is considerable. It has to
be taken from the train to the ship to cross the Solent; changed into another
ship at Southampton or perhaps at Liverpool after another train journey;
carried across the Atlantic Ocean; then across the continent of North
America; and finally delivered at the opposite side of the world to the Isle
of Wight. You would naturally expect the Postmaster-General to deliver a
dozen letters for you in the same terrace for a penny, and charge you a
pound or so for sending one letter to San Francisco. What he actually does

for you is to deliver the thirteen letters for three-halfpence apiece. By the
time these lines are in print he may be charging you only a penny apiece, as
he used to before the war. He charges you less than the cost of sending the
long-distance letter, and more than the cost of sending the short-distance
letters; but as he has thousands of short-distance letters to send and only
dozens of long-distance ones he can make up for the undercharge on the
long by an overcharge on the short. This charging the same for all letters is
called by economists averaging. Others call it gaining on the swings what
we lose on the roundabouts.
Our reason for forbidding private persons or companies to carry letters is
that if they were allowed to meddle, there would soon be companies selling
stamps at threepence a dozen to deliver letters within a few miles. The
Postmaster-General would get nothing but long-distance letters: that is, the
ones with a high cost of carriage. He would have to put up the price of his
stamps; and when we found that the advantage of sending a letter a mile or
two for a farthing was accompanied by the disadvantage of paying sixpence
or a shilling when we wanted to write to someone ten miles off, we should
feel that we had made a very bad bargain. The only gainers would be the
private companies who had upset our system. And when they had upset it
they would raise their short-distance prices to the traditional penny, if not
higher.
Now let us turn from this well-established nationalized service to one that
might be nationalized, and that concerns every housekeeper in the country
very intimately. I mean the coal supply. Coals have become a necessary of
life in our climate; and they are dreadfully dear. As I write these lines it is
midsummer, when coals are cheapest; and a circular dated the 16th June
offers me drawingroom coal for thirty-six and threepence a ton, and
anthracite for seventy shillings. That is much more than the average cost.
Why must I pay it? Why must you pay it? Simply because the coal industry
is not yet nationalized. It is private property.
The cost price of coal varies from nothing to a pound a ton or more, without
counting what it costs to carry and distribute the coal throughout the
country. Perhaps you do not believe that coals can be had for nothing; but I
assure you that on the Sunderland coast when the tide is out coals can be
picked up on the shore by all comers as freely as shells or seaweed. I have
seen them with my own eyes doing it. A sack and a back to carry it on is all

that anybody needs there to set up as a hawker of coals in a small way, or to
fill the cellar at home. Elsewhere on our coasts coal is so hard to reach that
shafts have been sunk and mines dug for miles under the sea, the coal not
having been reached until after twenty years work and a heavy expenditure
of money. Between these two extremes there are all sorts of mines, some
yielding so little coal at such high cost that they are worked only when the
price of coal rises to exceptional heights, and others in which coal is so
plentiful and easily got at that it is always profitable to work them even
when coal is unusually cheap. The money they cost to open up varies from
£350 to over a million. But the price you have to pay never falls below the
cost from the very dearest mines.
The reason is this. What makes prices high is scarcity: what brings them
down is plenty. Coals rise and fall in price just like strawberries. They are
dear when scarce, cheap when plenty.
Now an article can become scarce in several ways. One is by reducing the
quantity in the market by slackening or ceasing to manufacture. Another is
to increase the number of people who want to buy the article and have
money enough to pay for it. Yet another is to find out new uses for it. A
scarcity of coal can be produced not only by the increase of the population,
but by the people who formerly wanted only a scuttle of coals for the
kitchen fire wanting thousands of tons for blast furnaces and ocean
steamers. It is the scarcity produced in these ways that has raised the price
of coal to such a point that it is now worth while to tunnel out mines under
the sea. The cost of such mines is heavy; but it is not incurred until the price
of coal has gone up sufficiently to cover it with a profit. If the price falls
enough to cut off that profit the mine stops working and is abandoned. And
what is the consequence of that? The stopping of the mine cuts off the
supply of coals it used to send to the market; and the scarcity produced by
the stoppage sends the price up again until it is high enough to restart the
mine without losing money by it.
In this way the Intelligent Woman (and also the unintelligent one) finds
herself condemned always to pay for her coals the full cost of getting them
from the very dearest mines in use, though she may know that only the fag
end of the supply comes from these mines, the rest coming from mines
where the cost is much lower. She will be assured, if she remonstrates, that
the price is barely sufficient to enable some of the collieries to continue

working; and this will be quite true. What she will not be told, though it
also is quite true, is that the better mines are making excessive profits at her
expense, to say nothing of landlord’s royalties.
And here comes in another complication. The miners who hew out the coal
for wages in the better mines are paid no more than those in the worse ones
which can barely afford to keep going, because the men, unlike the coal,
can go from one mine to another, and what the poorest miner must accept
all must accept. Thus the wages of all the miners are kept down to the
poverty of the worst mines, just as the coal bills of all the housekeepers are
kept up to their high cost. The dissatisfied miners strike, making coals
scarcer and dearer than ever. The housekeepers grumble, but cannot bring
down prices, and blame “the middleman”. Nobody is satisfied except the
owners of the better mines.
The remedy here is, of course, the Postmaster-General’s plan of averaging.
If all the coal mines belonged to a Coalmaster-General he could set off the
good mines against the bad, and sell coal for the average cost of getting the
whole supply instead of having to sell it for the cost of getting it in the very
worst mines. To take fancy figures, if half the supply cost a pound a ton to
raise and the other half cost half a crown a ton, he could sell at eleven and
threepence a ton instead of at a pound. A Commercial Coal Trust, though it
might come to own all the mines, would not do this, because its object
would be to make as much profit as possible for its shareholders instead of
to make coal as cheap for you as possible. There is only one owner who
would work in your interest, and not want to make any profit at all. That
owner would be a Government Coalmaster-General, acting for the nation:
that is, acting for you and all the other housekeepers and users of coal.
Now you understand why you have the miners and the intelligent users and
buyers of coal demanding the nationalization of the coal mines, and all the
owners of the mines and the sellers of coal shrieking that nationalization
would mean waste, corruption, ruinously high prices, the destruction of our
commerce and industry, the end of our empire, and anything else they can
think of in their dismay at the prospect of losing the profits they make by
compelling us to pay a great deal more for our coal than it costs. But
however recklessly they shriek, they are careful never to mention the real
point of the whole business: that is, the procuring of coal for everybody at
cost price. To keep the attention of the public off that, they will declare that

nationalization is a wicked invention of the Bolshevists, and that the British
Government is so corrupt and incompetent that it could not manage a baked
potato stand honestly and capably, much less a coal mine. You may read ten
debates in the House of Commons on coal nationalization, and a hundred
newspaper articles on those debates, without ever learning what I have just
told you about the difference between the mines, and how by averaging the
cost of working them the price of your coals could be greatly reduced. Once
these facts are known and understood there is no room for further argument:
every purchaser of coal becomes a nationalizer at once; though every coal
proprietor is ready to spend the last penny he can spare to discredit and
prevent nationalization.
You see then how separate private property in coal mines hits a woman
every time she buys coals. Well, it hits her in precisely the same way every
time she buys a pair of scissors or a set of knives and forks or a flat-iron,
because iron mines and silver mines differ like coal mines. It hits her every
time she buys a loaf of bread, because wheat farms differ in fertility just
like mines: a bushel of wheat will cost much more to raise on one farm than
on another. It hits her every time she buys anything that is made in a
factory, because factories differ according to their distance from railways or
canals or seaports or big market towns or places where their raw materials
are plentiful, or where there is natural water power to drive their works. In
every case the shop price represents the cost of the article in the few mines
and factories where the cost of production is greatest. It never represents the
average cost taking one factory and one mine with another, which is the real
national cost. Thus she is kept poor in a rich country because all the
difference between the worst and the best in it is skimmed off for the
private owners of the mines and factories by simply charging her more for
everything she uses than the things cost. And it is to save her from this
monstrous imposition that the Socialists, and many people who never dream
of calling themselves Socialists, propose that the mines and factories shall
be made national property instead of private property. The difference
between the Socialist and non-Socialist nationalizers is that the non-
Socialists aim only at cheap coal, whereas the Socialists have the ulterior
object of bringing the mines into national ownership and control so as to
prevent their remaining an instrument of inequality of income. On the
immediate practical question of nationalization they are agreed. That is how

Socialism can advance without a majority of professed Socialists in
Parliament, or even without any.
Note that the difference between the highest cost of production under the
worst circumstances and the lower costs under more favorable
circumstances is called by economists rent. Mining rents and rents of
copyrights and patent rights are called royalties; and most people call
nothing rent except what they pay for house and land. But rent is part of the
price of everything that has a price at all, except things that are
communized, and things that are produced under the most unfavorable
conditions.

30
YOUR TAXES

B
ESIDES buying things in the shops you have to pay rates, taxes,
telephone rent (if you have a telephone), and rent of house and land.
Let us examine this part of your expenditure, and see whether you
get hit here again and again.
People grumble a great deal about the rates, because they get nothing across
the counter for them; and what they do get they share with everyone else, so
that they have no sense of individual property in it, as they have in their
clothes and houses and furniture. But they would not possess their clothes
or their furniture or their houses very long in peace but for the paved and
lighted and policed streets, the water supply and drainage, and all the other
services the rates pay for. The Intelligent Woman, when she begins to study
these matters, soon realizes that she gets better value for her rates than for
any other part of her expenditure, and that the municipal candidates who
ask for her vote on the ground that they are going to abolish or reduce the
rates (which they fortunately cannot do) are mostly either fools or humbugs,
if not both. And she has the satisfaction of knowing that she gets these
services as nearly as possible at their cost to the local authority, which not
only does not profiteer at her expense, but does for nothing a great deal of
directorial work that in any private business would have to be paid for, and
under present circumstances ought to be paid for, in public business as well.
The same advantage can be claimed for taxes. Of all the public services
which you pay for in taxes to the Government it can be said that there is no
direct profiteering in them: you get them for what they cost the
Government: that is, for much less than you would have to pay if they were
private business concerns.
So far it would seem that when you pay your rates and taxes you escape the
exactions which pursue you whenever you spend money in any other way.
You are perhaps beginning to feel that the next time the collector calls you
will hear his knock with joy, and welcome him with the beaming face of the
willing giver.

I am sorry to spoil it all; but the truth is that Capitalism plunders you
through the Government and the municipalities and County Councils as
effectually as it does through the shopkeeper. It is not only that the
Government and the local authorities, in order to carry on their public
services, have to buy vast quantities of goods from private profiteers who
charge them more than cost price, and that this overcharge is passed on to
you as a ratepayer and taxpayer. Nor is it that the Government of the
country, acting for the people of the country, cannot use the land of the
country without paying some private person heavily for leave to do so.
There are ways of getting round these overcharges, as, for instance, when
the Government buys a piece of land for its operations, but raises the money
to pay for it by a tax on rent which only the landlords pay, or when it raises
capital by a tax on unearned incomes. By this expedient it can, and
sometimes does, give you a complete and genuine cost price service. It can
even give it to you for nothing and make richer people pay for it.
But you are rated and taxed not only to pay for public services which are
equally useful to all, but for other things as well; and when you come to
these you may, if you are a rich woman, complain that you are being
plundered by Socialists for the benefit of the poor, or, if you are a poor
woman, that you are being plundered by Capitalists who throw on the rents
and taxes certain expenses which they should pay out of their own pockets.
Let us see what foundation there is for such complaints. Let us begin with
the rich. By taxation rich people have a quarter or a third of their incomes,
and very rich people more than half, taken from them by the Government,
not for any specified public service, but as pure nationalization
(communization) of their income to that extent without any compensation,
and by simple coercion. This is now taken so completely as a matter of
course that the rich never dream of asking for compensation, or refusing to
pay until their goods are forcibly seized, or even of calling it Bolshevik
confiscation; and so we are apt to talk as if such things never happened
except in the imaginations of wicked Communists; but they happen in Great
Britain regularly every January; and the Act authorizing them is brought in
every April by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Though reassuringly called
the Appropriation Act it is really an Expropriation Act.
There is nothing in the law or the Constitution, or in any custom or tradition
or parliamentary usage or any other part of our established morality, to

prevent this confiscated third or half being raised to three-quarters, nine-
tenths, or the whole. Besides this, when a very rich person dies, the
Government confiscates the entire income of the property for the next eight
years. The smallest taxable properties have to give up their incomes to the
Government for ten months, and the rest for different periods between these
extremes, in proportion to their amount.
In addition, there are certain taxes paid by rich and poor alike, called
indirect taxes. Some of them are taxes on certain articles of food, and on
tobacco and spirits, which you pay in the shop when you buy them, as part
of the price. Others are stamp duties: twopence if you give a receipt for £2
or more, sixpence if you make a simple written agreement, hundreds of
pounds on certain other documents which propertyless people never use.
None of these taxes are levied for a named service like the police rate or the
water rate: they are simple transfers of income from private pockets to the
national pocket, and, as such, acts of pure Communism. It may surprise you
to learn that even without counting the taxes on food, which fall on all
classes, the private property thus communized already amounts to nearly a
million a day.
The rich may well gasp at the figure, and ask what does the Government do
with it all? What value do they get for this contribution which appears so
prodigious to most of us who have to count our incomes in hundreds a year
and not in millions a day? Well, the Government provides an army and
navy, a civil service, courts of law and so forth; and, as we have seen, it
provides them either at cost price or more nearly at cost price than any
commercial concern would. But over a hundred million solid pounds of it
are handed over every year in hard cash in pensions and doles to the
unfortunate people who have small incomes or none.
This is pure redistribution of income: that is, pure Socialism. The officers of
the Government take the money from the rich and give it to the poor
because the poor have not enough and the rich have too much, without
regard to their personal merits. And here again there is no constitutional
limit to the process. I can remember a time when there was no supertax, and
the income tax was twopence in the pound instead of four-and-sixpence or
five shillings, and when Gladstone hoped to abolish it altogether. Nobody
dreamt then of using taxation as an instrument for effecting a more equal
distribution of income. Nowadays it is one of the chief uses of taxation; and

it could be carried to complete equality without any change in our annual
exchequer routine.
So far the poor have the better of the bargain. But some of the rich do very
well out of the taxes. By far the heaviest single item of Government
expenditure is the annual payment for the hire of the money we borrowed
for the war. It is all spent and gone; but we must go on paying for the hire
until we replace and repay it. Most of it was borrowed from the rich,
because they alone had any spare money to lend. Consequently the
Government takes a vast sum of money every year from the whole body of
rich, and immediately hands it back to those who lent it money for the war.
The effect of this transaction is simply to redistribute income between the
rich themselves. Those who lose by it make a fuss about what they call the
burden of the National Debt; but the nation is not a penny the poorer for
taking money from one bold Briton and giving it to another. Whether the
transfer is for better or worse depends on whether it increases or diminishes
the existing inequality. Unfortunately, it is bound, on the whole, to increase
it, because the Government, instead of taking money from some capitalists
and dividing it among them all, is taking money from all capitalists and
dividing it among some of them. This is the real mischief of the National
Debt, which, in so far as it is owed to our own people, is not a debt at all. To
illustrate, one may say that an elephant does not complain of being
burdened because its legs have to carry its own weight; but if all the weight
were on one side instead of being equally distributed between the legs, the
elephant would hardly be able to carry it, and would roll over on its back
when it met the slightest obstacle, which is very much what our trade does
under our unequal system.
It is sometimes said that the capitalists who lent the Government the money
for the war deserve the hire of it because they made sacrifices. As I was one
of them myself I can tell you without malice that this is sentimental
nonsense. They were the only people who were not called on to make any
sacrifice: on the contrary, they were offered a gilt-edged investment at five
per cent when they would have taken four. The people who were blinded,
maimed, or killed by the war were those really sacrificed; and those who
worked and fought were the real saviors of the country; whilst the people
who did nothing but seize the national loaf that others had made, and take a
big bite out of it (they and their servants) before passing on what they left of

it to the soldiers, did no personal service at all: they only made the food
shortage still shorter. The reason for pampering them in this absurd fashion
was not for any service or merit on their part: it was the special
consideration we have to shew to spare money as such because we are
afraid there would not be any available if we did not pamper a class by
giving it more than it can spend. We shall have to go further into this when
we examine the nature of capital later on. Meanwhile, if you had the
misfortune to lose an eye during one of the air raids, or if you lost your
husband or son, or if you “did your bit” strenuously throughout the war, and
are now a taxpayer, it must seem to you, to say the least, funny to have
money taken from you by the Government and handed over to some lady
who did nothing but live as indulgently as she could all the time. You will
not easily be convinced that it would have been a more dreadful thing for
the Government to commandeer her money than your husband’s limbs, or
your son’s life. The utmost that can be said is that it may have been more
expedient.
One more example of how your taxes may be used to enrich profiteers
instead of to do you any service. At the beginning of the war, the influence
of the profiteers was so strong that they persuaded the Government to allow
them to make all the shells instead of having them made in national
factories. The result was that you were paying taxes to keep workmen
standing idle in Woolwich Arsenal at full wages in order that the
profiteering firms should have all the work at a profit. You had to pay their
workmen too, and the profit into the bargain. It soon turned out that they
could not make nearly enough shells. Those they did make were
unnecessarily expensive and not always explosive. The result was an
appalling slaughter of our young men in Flanders, who were left almost
defenceless in the trenches through the shortage of munitions; and we were
on the verge of being defeated by simple extermination when the
Government, taking the matter in hand itself, opened national factories (you
may have worked in some of them) in which munitions were produced on
such a scale that we have hardly yet got rid of what was left of them when
the war ended, besides controlling the profiteers, teaching them their
business (they did not know even how to keep proper accounts, and were
wasting money like water), and limiting their profits drastically. And yet, in
the face of this experience (which was of course a tremendous triumph for
the advocates of nationalized industries), the war was no sooner at an end

than the capitalist papers began again with their foolish and corrupt
declarations that Governments are such incompetent and dishonest and
extravagant jobbers, and private firms so splendidly capable and
straightforward, that Governments must never do anything that private
firms can make profits by doing; and very soon all the national factories
were sold for an old song to the profiteers, and the national workers were in
the streets with the demobilized soldiers, living on the dole, two millions
strong.
This is only a sensational instance of something that is always going on:
namely, the wasting of your money by employing profiteering contractors
to do the work that could be done better by the authorities themselves
without charging you any profit.
You see therefore that when you pay rates and taxes you are not safe from
being charged not only the cost price of public services, but huge sums
which go to private employers as unnecessary or excessive profits, to the
landlords and capitalists whose land and capital these employers use, and to
those property owners who hold the War Loan and the other stocks which
represent the National Debt. But as you may also get back some of it as a
pensioner or a recipient of public relief in some form or other, or as you
may yourself be a holder of War Loan or Consols, or a shareholder in one of
the commercial concerns which get contracts from the Government and the
municipalities, it is impossible for me to say whether, on the whole, you
gain or lose. I can only say that the chances are ten to one that you lose on
balance; that is, that the rich get more out of you through the Government
than you get out of them. So much for the taxes. Now for the rates.

31
YOUR RATES

T
HE rates are not paid equally by everybody. The local authorities, like
the Government, have to recognize the fact that some people are
better able to pay than others, and make them pay accordingly. They
do this by calculating the rates on the value of the house occupied by the
ratepayer, and of his place of business, guessing that a person with a house
or shop worth a hundred a year will be richer than one with a house or shop
worth twenty, and rating him on the valuation.
Thus every rate is really a graduated income tax as well as a payment for
public services. Then there are the municipal debts as well as the national
debt; and as municipalities are as lazy and wasteful as central governments
in the way of giving public jobs out to profiteering contractors, everything
that happens with the taxes happens with the rates as well on a smaller
scale.
But there are other anomalies which rating brings out.
Just consider what happens when even the quite genuine part of our
national and municipal Communism, paying its way honestly by taxing and
rating, is applied, as we apply it, to people of whom some are very poor and
some are very rich. If a woman cannot afford to feed herself well enough to
nurse her baby properly she clearly cannot afford to contribute to the
maintenance of a stud of cream-colored ponies in the stables of
Buckingham Palace. If she lives with her husband and children in a single
room in a back-to-back dwelling in a slum, hopelessly out of reach of the
public parks of the great cities, with their flowers and bands and rides and
lakes and boats, it is rather hard on her to have to pay a share of the cost of
these places of recreation, used largely by rich people whose horses and
motor cars shew that they could easily pay a charge for admission sufficient
to maintain the place without coming to her for a contribution.
In short, since communistic expenditure is compulsory expenditure,
enforced on everybody alike, it cannot be kept within everybody’s means

unless everybody has the same income. But the remedy is, not to abolish the
parks and the cream-colored ponies, and to tell the Prince of Wales that he
cannot have more than one suit of clothes until every poor woman’s son has
two, all of which is not only impossible but envious and curmudgeonish,
but to equalize incomes. In the meantime we must pay our rates and taxes
with the best grace we can, knowing that if we tried to drag down public
expenditure to the level of the worst private poverty our lives would be
unendurable even by savages.
This, however, does not apply to certain ways in which the ratepayer is
“exploited”. To exploit a person is to make money out of her without giving
her an equivalent return. Now practically all private employers exploit the
ratepayer more or less in a way that she never notices unless she has studied
the subject as we are studying it at present. And the way they do it is this.
A woman who employs domestic servants gives regular employment to
most of them; but to some she gives only casual employment. The
housemaid and cook are in regular employment; the nurse is in temporary
employment; and the charwoman is in casual employment: that is, she is
taken on for a few hours or for a day, and then cast off to shift for herself as
best she can until she gets another equally short job. If she is ill, none of her
occasional employers need concern herself: and when rich people die and
make provision for their servants in their wills, they never think of
including a legacy for the charwoman.
Now no doubt it is very convenient to be able to pick up a woman like a
taxi for an hour or so, and then get rid of her without any further
responsibility by paying her a few shillings and turning her into the street.
But it means that when the charwoman is ill or out of employment or
getting so old that younger and stronger women are preferred to her,
somebody has to provide for her. And that somebody is the ratepayer, who
provides the outdoor relief and the workhouse, besides, as taxpayer, the old
age pension and part of the dole. If the ratepayer did not do this the
householder would have either to do without the charwoman or pay her
more. Even regular servants could not, as at present, be discharged without
pensions when they are worn out, if the ratepayers made no provision for
them. Thus the householder is making the other ratepayers, many of whom
do not employ charwomen, pay part of the cost of her domestic service.

But this is perhaps not the most impressive case, because you, as an
experienced woman, can tell me that charwomen do not do so badly for
themselves; that they are hard to get; and that steady ones often have their
pick of several jobs, and make a compliment of taking one. But think of the
great industrial concerns which employ huge armies of casuals. Take the
dock companies for example. The men who load and unload the ships are
taken on by the hour in hundreds at a time; and they never know whether
there will be an hour’s work for them or eight hours, or whether they will
get two days in the week or six. I can remember when they were paid
twopence an hour, and how great a victory they were supposed to have
gained when they struck for sixpence an hour and got it. The dock
companies profit; but the men and their families are nearly always living
more or less on the rates.
Take the extreme case of this. The ratepayers have to maintain a workhouse.
If any man presents himself at that workhouse as a destitute person, he must
be taken in and lodged and fed and clothed. It is an established practice with
some men to live at the workhouse as ablebodied paupers until they feel
disposed for a night of drinking and debauchery. Then they demand their
discharge, and must be let out to go about their business. They unload a
ship; spend all the money they earn in a reckless spree; and return to the
workhouse next morning as destitute persons to resume their residence
there at the ratepayers’ expense. A woman can do the same when there are
casual jobs within her reach. This, I repeat, is the extreme case only: the
decent respectable laborers do not do it; but casual labor does not tend to
make people decent and respectable. If they were not careless, and did not
keep up their spirits and keep down their prudence by drinking more than is
good for them, they could not endure such worrying uncertainty.
Now, as it happens, dock labor is dangerous labor. In busy times in big
docks an accident happens about every twenty minutes. But the dock
company does not keep a hospital to mend its broken casuals. Why should
it? There is the Poor Law Infirmary, supported by the ratepayers, near at
hand, or a hospital supported by their charitable subscriptions; and nothing
is simpler than to carry the victim of the accident there to be cured at the
public expense without troubling the dock company. No wonder the dock
company chairmen and directors are often among our most ardent
advocates of public charity. With them it begins at home.

Another public institution kept by the ratepayers and taxpayers is the
prison, with its police force, its courts of law, its judges, and all the rest of
its very expensive retinue. An enormous proportion of the offences they
deal with are caused by drink. Now the trade in drink is extremely
profitable: so much so that in England it is called The Trade, which is short
for The Trade of Trades. But why is it profitable? Because the trader in
drink takes all the money the drunkard pays for his liquor, and when he is
drunk throws him into the street, leaving the ratepayer to pay for all the
mischief he may do, all the crimes he may commit, all the illness he may
bring on himself and his family, and all the poverty to which he may be
reduced. If the cost of these were charged against the drink trade instead of
against the police rates and poor rates, the profits of the trade would vanish
at once.
As it is, the trader gets all the takings; and the ratepayer stands all the
losses. That is why they made the trade unlawful in America. They shut up
the saloons (public houses), and found immediately that they could shut up
a good many of the prisons as well. But if they had municipalized the drink
traffic: that is, if the ratepayer had kept the public house as well as the
prison, the greatest care would have been taken to discourage drunkenness,
because drunkenness would have produced a loss in the municipal accounts
instead of a profit. As it is, the ratepayer is being exploited outrageously by
the drink trade, and the whole nation weakened and demoralized in order
that a handful of people may become unnaturally rich. It is true that they
rebuild our tumble-down cathedrals for us occasionally; but then they
expect to be made peers for it. The bargain is an insanely bad one anyhow.
There is one more trick that can be played on you both by the municipality
and the Government. In spite of their obligation not to profiteer, but to give
you every service at cost price, they often do profiteer quite openly, and
actually boast of their profits as a proof of their business efficiency. This
takes place when you pay for the service, not by a tax or a rate, but by the
ordinary process of paying for what you consume. Thus when you want a
letter sent, you pay the Government three halfpence across the counter for
the job. When you live where electric light is made and supplied by the
municipality, you do not pay for it in your rates: you pay so much for every
unit you consume.

I am sorry to have to add that the Postmaster-General takes advantage of
this to charge you more for carrying your letter than the average cost of it to
the Post Office. In this way he makes a profit which he hands over to the
Chancellor of the Exchequer, who uses it to keep down the income tax and
supertax. You pay more that the income tax payers may pay less. A fraction
of your three halfpence goes into the pockets of the millionaires. True, if
you are an income tax payer you get a scrap of it back yourself; but as most
people do not pay income tax and everybody buys at least a few postage
stamps, the income tax payers in effect exploit the purchasers of stamps.
The principle is wrong, and the practice a dangerous abuse, which is
nevertheless applauded and carried to greater and greater lengths as the
Government adds telegraphs to posts, telephones to telegraphs, and wireless
to both.
In the case of a municipal electric lighting supply, I must tell you that in
spite of the fact that the municipality, unlike a private company, has to
begin paying off the cost of setting up its works from the moment it
borrows it, and must clear it all off within a certain period, yet even when it
does this and yet supplies electricity at a lower price than the private
companies, it makes a profit in spite of itself. It applies the profit to a
reduction of the rates; and the ratepayers are so pleased by this, and so
accustomed to think that a business which makes profits must be a sound
one, that the municipality is tempted to make a profit on purpose, and even
a big one, by charging the consumer more than the supply costs. When this
happens, it is clear that the overcharged people who use electric light are
paying part of the rates of those who do not. Even if everybody used
electric light there would still be inequalities in the consumption of current.
A struggling shopkeeper, who must make his shop blaze with light to attract
custom, must have a heavier bill for electric light than much richer people
who have only their private houses to illuminate.
We must not spend any more time on your rates and taxes. If they were
entirely abolished (how popular that would be!) and their places taken by
profiteering charges for State and municipal services, the result would be,
not State and municipal Socialism but State and municipal Capitalism. As it
is, you can see how even in your rates, which ought to be quite free from
the idler’s toll, you can be and to some extent are “exploited” just as you are
in your ordinary shopping.

32
YOUR RENT

W
HEN we come from your rates and taxes to your rent, your
grievance is far clearer, because when you pay your rent you have
to hand your money directly to your exploiter to do what she or he
likes with instead of to a public treasurer who gives you value for part of it
in public service to yourself, and tells you nothing about the remainder
which goes to septuagenarians, paupers, ground landlords, profiteering
contractors, and so forth, some of whom are poorer than you, which makes
for equality of income and is therefore a move in the right direction, and
others richer, which aggravates inequality and is therefore a move in the
wrong direction.
Rent paying is simpler. If you rent a piece of land and work on it, it is quite
clear that the landlord is living on your earnings; and you cannot prevent
him, because the law gives him the power to turn you off the land unless
you pay him for leave to use it. You are so used to this that it may never
have struck you as extraordinary that any private person should have the
power to treat the earth as if it belonged to him, though you would certainly
think him mad if he claimed to own the air or the sunlight or the sea.
Besides, you may be paying rent for a house; and it seems reasonable that
the man who built the house should be paid for it. But you can easily find
out how much of what you are paying is the value of the house. If you have
insured the house against fire (very likely the landlord makes you do this),
you know what it would cost to build the house, as that is the sum you have
insured it for. If you have not insured it, ask a builder what it would cost to
build a similar house. The interest you would have to pay every year if you
borrowed that sum on the security of the house is the value of the house
apart from the value of the land.
You will find that what you are paying exceeds this house value, unless you
are in the landlord’s employment or the house has become useless for its
original purpose: for instance, a medieval castle. In big cities like London, it
exceeds it so enormously that the value of the building is hardly worth

mentioning in comparison. In out-of-the-way places the excess may be so
small that it hardly goes beyond a reasonable profit on the speculation of
building the house. But in the lump over the whole country it amounts to
hundreds of millions of pounds a year; and this is the price, not of the
houses, but of the landlords’ permission to live on the native earth on which
the houses have been built.
That any person should have the power to give or refuse an Englishwoman
permission to live in England, or indeed—for this is what it comes to—to
live at all, is so absurdly opposed to every possible conception of natural
justice that any lawyer will tell you that there is no such thing as absolute
private property in land, and that the King, in whom the land is vested, may
take it all back from its present holders if he thinks fit. But as the landlords
were for many centuries also both the lawmakers and the kingmakers, they
took care that, king or no king, land should become in practice as much
private property as anything else, except that it cannot be bought and sold
without paying fees to lawyers and signing conveyances and other special
legal documents. And this private power over land has been bought and sold
so often that you never know whether your landlord will be a bold baron
whose ancestors have lived as petty kings on their tenants since the days of
William the Conqueror, or a poor widow who has invested all her
hardearned savings in a freehold.
Howbeit the fact remains that the case of landlord and tenant is one in
which an idle and possibly infamous person can with the police at his back
come quite openly to an industrious and respectable woman, and say, “Hand
me over a quarter of your earnings or get off the earth”. The landlord can
even refuse to accept a rent, and order her off the earth unconditionally; and
he sometimes does so; for you may remember that in Scotland whole
populations of fishermen and husbandmen with their families have been
driven from their country to the backwoods of America because their
landlords wanted the land on which they lived for deer forests. In England
people have been driven from the countryside in multitudes to make room
for sheep, because the sheep brought more money to the landlord than the
people. When the great London railway stations, with their many acres of
sidings, were first made, the houses of great numbers of people were
knocked down, and the inhabitants driven into the streets; with the result
that the whole neighbourhood became so overcrowded that it was for many

years a centre of disease infecting all London. These things are still
happening, and may happen to you at any moment, in spite of a few laws
which have been made to protect tenants in towns in times of great scarcity
of houses such as that which followed the war, or in Ireland, where the
Government bought the agricultural land and resold it to the farmers, which
eased matters for a time, but in the long run can come to nothing but
exchanging one set of landlords for another.
It is in large towns and their neighbourhood that the Intelligent Woman will
find not only how much the landlord can make her give up to him, but,
oddly enough, how devoutly he believes in equality of income for his
tenants, if not for himself. In the middle of the town she will find rents very
high. If she or her husband has work to do there it will occur to her that if
she were to take a house in the suburbs, where rents are lower, and use the
tram to come to and fro, she might save a little. But she will find that the
landlord knows all about that, and that though the further she moves out
into the country the lower the rents, yet the railway fare or tram fare will
bring up the yearly cost to what she would have to pay if she lived close
enough in to walk to her market or for her husband to walk to his work.
Whatever advantage she may try to gain, the landlord will snatch its full
money value from her sooner or later in rent, provided it is an advantage
open to everyone. It ought to be plain even to a fairly stupid woman that if
the land belongs to a few people they can make their own terms with the
rest, who must have land to live and work on or else starve on the highway
or be drowned in the sea. They can strip them of everything except what is
barely enough to keep them alive to earn money for the landowner, and
bring up families to do the same in the next generation.
It is easy to see how this foolish state of things comes about. As long as
there is plenty of land for everybody private property in land works very
well. The landholders are not preventing anyone else from owning land like
themselves; and they are quite justified in making the strongest laws to
protect themselves against having their lands intruded on and their crops
taken by rascals who want to reap where they have not sown. But this state
of things never lasts long with a growing population, because at last all the
land gets taken up, and there is none left for the later comers. Even long
before this happens the best land is all taken up, and later comers find that
they can do as well by paying rent for the use of the best land as by owning

poorer land themselves, the amount of the rent being the difference between
the yield of the poorer land and the better. At this point the owners of the
best land can let their land; stop working; and live on the rent: that is, on the
labor of others, or, as they call it, by owning.
When big towns and great industries arise, the value of the land goes up to
enormous heights: in London bits of land with frontages on the important
streets sell at the rate of a million pounds an acre; and men of business will
pay the huge rents that make the land worth such a figure, although there is
land forty miles away to be had for next to nothing. The land that was first
let gets sublet, and yet again and again sublet until there may be half a
dozen leaseholders and subleaseholders drawing more rent from it than the
original ground landlord; and the tenant who is in working occupation of it
has to make the money for all of them. Within the last hundred and fifty
years villages in Europe and pioneer encampments in the other continents
have grown into towns and cities making money by hundreds of millions;
yet most of the inhabitants whose work makes all this wealth are no better
off, and many of them decidedly worse off, than the villagers or pioneer
campers-out who occupied the place when it was not worth a pound an
acre. Meanwhile the landlords have become fabulously rich, some of them
taking every day, for doing nothing, more than many a woman for sixty
years drudgery.
And all this could have been avoided if we had only had the sense and
foresight to insist that the land should remain national property in fact as
well as in legal theory, and that all rents should be paid into a common
stock and used for public purposes. If that had been done there need have
been no slums, no ugly mean streets and buildings, nor indeed any rates or
taxes: everybody would benefit by the rent; everybody would have to
contribute to it by work; and no idler would be able to live on the labor of
others. The prosperity of our great towns would be a real prosperity, shared
by everyone, and not what it is now, the enslavement and impoverishment
of nine persons out of every ten in order that the tenth should be idle and
rich and extravagant and useless. This evil is so glaring, so inexcusable by
any sophistry that the cleverest landlord can devise, that, long before
Socialism was heard of, a demand arose for the abolition of all taxation
except the taxation of landowners; and we still have among us people called
Single Taxers, who preach the same doctrine.

33
CAPITAL

N
OW the Single Taxers are not wrong in principle; but they are behind
the times. Out of landowning there has grown a lazier way of living
on other people’s labor without doing anything for them in return.
Land is not the only property that returns a rent to the owner. Spare money
will do the same if it is properly used. Spare money is called Capital; its
owner is called a capitalist; and our system of leaving all the spare money
in the country in private hands like the land is called Capitalism. Until you
understand Capitalism you do not understand human society as it exists at
present. You do not know the world, as the saying is. You are living in a
fool’s paradise; and Capitalism is doing its best to keep you there. You may
be happier in a fool’s paradise; and as I must now proceed to explain
Capitalism, you will read the rest of this book at the risk of being made
unhappy and rebellious, and even of rushing into the streets with a red flag
and making a greater fool of yourself than Capitalism has ever made of you.
On the other hand, if you do not understand Capitalism you may easily be
cheated out of all your money, if you have any, or, if you have none, duped
into sacrificing yourself in all sorts of ways for the profit of mercenary
adventurers and philanthropic humbugs under the impression that you are
exercising the noblest virtues. Therefore I will risk letting you know where
you are and what is happening to you.
Nothing but a very narrow mind can save you from despair if you look at all
the poverty and misery around you and can see no way out of it all. And if
you had a narrow mind you would never have dreamt of buying this book
and reading it. Fortunately, you need not be afraid to face the truth about
our Capitalism. Once you understand it, you will see that it is neither eternal
nor even very old-established, neither incurable nor even very hard to cure
when you have diagnosed it scientifically. I use the word cure because the
civilization produced by Capitalism is a disease due to shortsightedness and
bad morals: and we should all have died of it long ago if it were not that
happily our society has been built up on the ten commandments and the
gospels and the reasonings of jurists and philosophers, all of which are

flatly opposed to the principles of Capitalism. Capitalism, though it has
destroyed many ancient civilizations, and may destroy ours if we are not
careful, is with us quite a recent heresy, hardly two hundred years old at its
worst, though the sins it has let loose and glorified are the seven deadly
ones, which are as old as human nature.
And now I hear you say “My gracious goodness me, what on the face of the
earth has all this to do with the possession of spare money by ordinary
ladies and gentlemen, which you say is all that Capitalism is?” And I reply,
farfetched as it may seem, that it is out of that innocent looking beginning
that our huge burden of poverty and misery and drink and crime and vice
and premature death has grown. When we have examined the possibilities
of this apparently simple matter of spare money, alias Capital, you will find
that spare money is the root of all evil, though it ought to be, and can be
made, the means of all betterment.
What is spare money? It is the money you have left when you have bought
everything you need to keep you becomingly in your station in life. If you
can live on ten pounds a week in the way you are accustomed and content
to live, and your income is fifteen pounds a week, you have five pounds
spare money at the end of the week, and are a capitalist to that amount. To
be a capitalist, therefore, you must have more than enough to live on.
Consequently a poor person cannot become a capitalist. A poor person is
one who has less than enough to live on. I can remember a bishop, who
ought to have known better, exhorting the poor in the east end of London, at
a time when poverty there was even more dreadful than it is at present, to
become capitalists by saving. He really should have had his apron publicly
and officially torn off him, and his shovel hat publicly and officially jumped
on, for such a monstrously wicked precept. Imagine a woman, without
enough money to feed her children properly and clothe them decently and
healthily, letting them starve still more, and go still more ragged and naked,
to buy Savings Certificates, or to put her money in the Post Office Savings
Bank and keep it there until there is enough of it to buy stocks and shares!
She would be prosecuted for neglecting her children: and serve her right! If
she pleaded that the bishop incited her to commit this unnatural crime, she
would be told that the bishop could not possibly have meant that she should
save out of her children’s necessary food and clothing, or even out of her

own. And if she asked why the bishop did not say so, she would be told to
hold her tongue; and the gaoler would be ordered to remove her to the cells.
Poor people cannot save, and ought not to try. Spending is not only a first
necessity but a first duty. Nine people out of ten have not enough money to
spend on themselves and their families; and to preach saving to them is not
only foolish but wicked. Schoolmistresses are already complaining that the
encouragement held out by Building Societies to poor parents to buy their
own houses has led to the underfeeding of their children. Fortunately most
of the poor neither save nor try to. All the spare money invested in the
Savings Banks and Building Societies and Co-operative Societies and
Savings Certificates, though it sounds very imposing when it is totalled up
into hundreds of millions, and all credited to the working classes, is such a
mere fleabite compared to the total sums invested that its poor owners
would gain greatly by throwing it into the common stock if the capital
owned by the rich were thrown in at the same time. The great bulk of
British capital, the capital that matters, is the spare money of those who
have more than enough to live on. It saves itself without any privation to the
owner. The only question is, what is to be done with it? The answer is, keep
it for a rainy day: you may want it yet. This is simple; but suppose it will
not keep! Of course Treasury notes will keep; and Bank notes will keep;
and metal coins will keep: and cheque books will keep; and entries of sums
of money in the ledgers in the bank will keep safely enough. But these
things are only legal claims to the goods we need, chiefly food. Food, we
know, will not keep. And what good will spare money be to us when the
food it represents has gone rotten?
The Intelligent Woman, when she realizes that money really means the
things that money can buy, and that the most important of these things are
perishable, will see that spare money cannot be saved: it must be spent at
once. It is only the Very Simple Woman who puts her spare money into an
old stocking and hides it under a loose board in the floor. She thinks that
money is always money. But she is quite wrong in this. It is true that gold
coins will always be worth the metal they are made of; but in Europe at
present gold coins are not to be had: there is nothing but paper money; and
within the last few years we have seen English paper money fall in value
until a shilling would buy no more than could be bought for sixpence before
the war, whilst on the Continent a thousand pounds would not buy a postage

stamp, and notes for fifty thousand pounds would hardly pay a tram fare.
People who thought themselves and their children provided for for life were
reduced to destitution all over Europe; and even in England women left
comfortably-off by insurances made by their fathers found themselves
barely able to get along by the hardest pinching. That was what came of
putting their trust in money.
Whilst people were being cheated in this fashion out of their savings by
Governments printing heaps of Treasury notes and Bank notes with no
goods at their back, several rich men of business became enormously richer
because, having obtained goods on credit, they were able to pay for them in
money that had become worthless. Naturally these rich men of business
used all their power and influence to make their Governments go from bad
to worse with their printing of bogus notes, whilst other rich men of
business who, instead of owing money were owed it, used their influence in
the opposite direction; so that the Governments never knew where they
were: one set of business men telling them to print more notes, and another
set to print less, and none of them seeming to realize that they were playing
with the food of the people. The bad advice always won, because the
Governments themselves owed money, and were glad enough to pay it in
cheap paper, following the example of Henry VIII, who cheated his
creditors by giving short weight in his silver coins.
The Intelligent Woman will conclude, and conclude rightly, that hoarding
money is not a safe way of saving. If her money is not spent at once she can
never be sure what it will be worth ten years hence, or ten weeks or even
ten days or minutes in war time.
But you, prudent lady, will remind me that you do not want to spend your
spare money: you want to keep it. If you wanted anything that it could buy
it would not be spare money. If a woman has just finished a good dinner it
is no use advising her to order another and eat it immediately so as to make
sure of getting something for her money: she had better throw it out of the
window. What she wants to know is how she can spend it and save it too.
That is impossible; but she can spend it and increase her income by
spending it. If you would like to know how, read the next chapter.

34
INVESTMENT AND ENTERPRISE

I
F, having finished your dinner, you can find a hungry person who can be
depended on to give you a dinner, say after a year’s time, for nothing,
you can spend your spare money in giving him a dinner for nothing; and
in this way you will in a sense both spend your money on the spot and save
it for next year, or, to put it the other way, you will have your spare food
eaten while it is fresh and yet have fresh food to eat a year hence.
You will at once reply that you can find a million hungry persons only too
easily, but that none of them can be depended on to provide a dinner for
themselves, much less for you, next year: if they could, they would not be
hungry. You are quite right; but there is a way round the difficulty. You will
not be able to find dependable men who are hungry; but your banker or
stockbroker or solicitor will find you plenty of more or less dependable
persons, some of them enormously rich, who, though overfed, are
nevertheless always in want of huge quantities of spare food.
What do they want it for? Why, to feed the hungry men who cannot be
depended on, not on the chance of their returning the compliment next year,
but for doing some work immediately that will bring in money later on.
There is nothing to prevent any Intelligent Woman with spare money
enough from doing this herself if she has enough invention and business
ability.
Suppose, for instance, she has a big country house in a big park. Suppose
her park blocks up the shortest way from one important town to another,
and that the public roads that go round her park are hilly and twisty and
dangerous for motor cars. She can then use her spare food to feed the
hungry men while they make a road for motors through her park. When this
is done she can send the hungry men away to find another job as best they
can, leaving herself with a new road for the use of which she can charge a
shilling to every motorist who uses it, as they all will to save time and risk
and difficulty. She can keep one of the hungry men to collect the shillings
for her. In this way she will have changed her spare food into a steady

income. In city language, she will have gone into business as a roadmaker
with her own capital.
Now if the traffic on the road be so great that the shillings, and the spare
food they represent, pile themselves up on her hands faster than she can
spend them (or eat them), she will have to find some new means of
spending them to prevent the new spare food going bad. She will have to
call the hungry men back and find something new for them to do. She might
set them to build houses all along the road. Then she could present the road
to the local authorities to be maintained by the ratepayers as a public street,
and yet greatly increase her income by letting the houses. Having in this
way obtained more spare money than ever, she could establish a service of
motor buses to the nearest town to enable her tenants to work there and her
workmen to live there. She could set up an electric lighting plant and
gasworks to supply their houses. She could turn her big house into a hotel,
or knock it down and cover its site and the park with new houses and
streets. The hungry would do all the executive work for her: what she would
have to do would be to give them the necessary orders and allow them to
live on her spare food meanwhile.
But, you will say, only an exceptionally able and hardworking woman of
business could plan all this and superintend its carrying-out. Suppose she
were too stupid or too lazy to think of these things, or a genius occupied
with art or science or religion or politics! Well, if only she had the spare
money, hungry women and men with the requisite ability would come to
her and offer to develop her estate and to pay her so much a year for the use
of her land and of her spare money, arranging it all with her solicitor so that
she would not have to lift her little finger in the matter except to sign her
name sometimes. In business language, she could invest her capital in the
development of her estate.
Now consider how much further these operations can be carried than the
mere investment of one lady’s savings, and the development of one lady’s
estate in the country. Big companies, by collecting millions of spare
subsistence in small or large sums from people all over the country who are
willing to take shares according to their means, can set the hungry to dig
those mines that run out under the sea and need twenty years work before
the coal is reached. They can make railways and monster steamships; they
can build factories employing thousands of men, and equip them with

machinery; they can lay cables across the ocean: there is no end or limit to
what they can do as long as they can borrow spare food enough for the
hungry men until the preparations are finished and the businesses begin to
pay their own way.
Sometimes the schemes fail, and the owners of the spare food lose it; but
they have to risk this because, as the food will not keep, they would lose it
all the same if they did not invest it. So there is always spare money being
offered to the big men of business and their companies; and thus our queer
civilization, with its many poor and its few rich, grows as we see it with all
its shops, factories, railways, mines, ocean liners, aeroplanes, telephones,
palaces, mansions, flats, and cottages, on top of the fundamental sowing
and reaping of the food that it all depends on.
Such is the magic of spare subsistence, called capital. That is how idle
people who have land and spare subsistence become enormously rich
without knowing how, and make their babies enormously rich in their
cradles, whilst the landless penniless persons who do it all by slaving from
dawn to dusk are left as poor at the end of the job as they were at the
beginning.

35
LIMITATIONS OF CAPITALISM

M
ANY people are so impressed with the achievements of Capitalism
that they believe that if you overthrow it you overthrow
civilization. It seems to them indispensable. We must therefore
consider, first, what are the disadvantages of this way of doing it? and,
second, is there any other way?
Now in one sense there is no other way. All the businesses that need to have
many weeks or months or years of work done on them by large bodies of
men before they can pay their way, require great quantities of spare
subsistence. If it takes ten years to make a harbor or twenty years to make a
coal mine, the men who are making it will be eating their heads off all that
time. Other people must be providing them with food, clothes, lodging, and
so forth without immediate return, just as parents have to provide for
growing children. In this respect it makes no difference whether we vote for
Capitalism or Socialism. The process is one of natural necessity which
cannot be changed by any political revolution nor evaded by any possible
method of social organization.
But it does not follow that the collection and employment of spare
subsistence for these purposes must be done by private companies touting
for the money that very rich people are too gorged with luxuries to be able
to spend, and that people of more moderate means are prudent enough to
put by for a rainy day.
To begin with, there are many most necessary things that the private
companies and employers will not do because they cannot make people pay
for them when they are done. Take for instance a lighthouse. Without
lighthouses we should hardly dare to go to sea; and the trading ships would
have to go so slowly and cautiously, and so many of them would be
wrecked, that the cost of the goods they carry would be much higher than it
is. Therefore we all benefit greatly by lighthouses, even those of us who
have never seen the sea and never expect to. But the capitalists will not
build lighthouses. If the lighthouse keeper could collect a payment from

every ship that passed, they would build them fast enough until the cost was
lighted all round like the sea front in Brighton; but as this is impossible, and
the lighthouses must shine on every ship impartially without making the
captain put his hand in his pocket for it, the capitalists leave the coast in the
dark. Therefore the Government steps in and collects spare subsistence in
the shape of taxes from everybody (which is quite fair, as everybody shares
the benefit), and builds the lighthouses. Here we see Capitalism failing
completely to supply what to a seafaring nation like ours is one of the first
necessaries of life (for we should starve without our shipping) and thereby
forcing us to resort to Communism.
But Capitalism often refuses necessary work even when some money can
be made out of it directly.
For example, a lighthouse reminds us of a harbor, which is equally
necessary. Every ship coming into a harbor has to pay harbor dues;
therefore anyone making a harbor can make money by it. But great harbors,
with their breakwaters and piers built up in the sea, take so many years to
construct, and the work is so liable to damage and even destruction in
storms, and the impossibility of raising harbor dues beyond a certain point
without sending the ships round to cheaper harbors so certain, that private
capital turns away from it to enterprises in which there is more certainty as
to what the cost will be, less delay, and more money to be made. For
instance, distilleries make large profits. There is no uncertainty about the
cost of building them and fitting them up; and a ready sale for whiskey can
always be depended on. You can tell to within a few hundred pounds what a
big distillery will cost, whereas you cannot tell to within a million what a
big harbor will cost. All this would not influence the Government, which
has to consider only whether another distillery or another harbor is more
wanted for the good of the nation. But the private capitalists have not the
good of the nation in their charge: all they have to consider is their duty to
themselves and their families, which is to choose the safest and most
profitable way of investing their spare money. Accordingly they choose the
distillery; and if we depended on private capitalists alone the country would
have as many distilleries as the whiskey market could support, and no
harbors. And when they have established their distillery they will spend
enormous sums of money in advertisements to persuade the public that their
whiskey is better and healthier and older and more famous than the whiskey

made in other distilleries, and that everybody ought to drink whiskey every
day as a matter of course. As none of these statements is true, the printing of
them is, from the point of view of the nation, a waste of wealth, a
perversion of labor, and a propaganda of pernicious humbug.
The private capitalists not only choose what will make most money for
them, but what will make it with least trouble: that is, they will do as little
for it as possible. If they sell an article or a service, they will make it as dear
as possible instead of as cheap as possible. This would not matter if, as
thoughtless people imagine, the lower the price the bigger the sale, and the
bigger the sale the greater the profit. It is true in many cases that the lower
the price the bigger the sale; but it is not true that the bigger the sale the
greater the profit. There may be half a dozen prices (and consequently
sales) at which the profit will be exactly the same.
Take the case of a cable laid across the ocean to send messages to foreign
countries. How much a word is the company to charge for the messages? If
the charge is a pound a word very few people can afford to send them. If the
charge is a penny a word the cable will be crowded with messages all day
and all night. Yet the profit may be the same; and, if it is, it will be far less
trouble to send one word at a pound than two hundred and forty words at a
penny.
The same is true of the ordinary telegraph service. When it was in the hands
of private companies, the service was restricted and expensive. When the
Government took it over, it not only extended lines of all sorts to out-of-the-
way places; cheapened the service; and did without a profit: it actually ran it
at what the private capitalist calls a loss. It did this because the cheap
service was such a benefit to the whole community, including the people
who never send telegrams as well as those who send a dozen every day, that
it paid the nation and was much fairer as well to reduce the price charged to
the actual senders below the cost of the service, the difference being made
up by everybody in taxes.
This very desirable arrangement is quite beyond the power of private
Capitalism, which not only keeps the price as high as possible above the
cost of production and service for the sake of making the utmost profit, but
has no power to distribute that cost over all the people who benefit, and
must levy it entirely on those who actually buy the goods or pay for the

service. It is true that business people can pass the cost of their telegrams
and telephone messages on to their customers in the price of the things they
sell; but a great deal of our telegraphing and telephoning is not business
telegraphing and telephoning; and its cost cannot be passed on by the
senders to anyone. The only objection to throwing the cost entirely on
public taxation is that if we could all send telegrams of unlimited length
without having to pay across the counter enough ready money to prevent us
using the telegraph service when the post would do as well, or sticking in
“kind regards from all to dear Aunt Jane and a kiss from Baby” at the end of
every message, the lines would be so choked that we should not be able to
send telegrams at all. As to the telephone, some women would hang on to it
all day if it made no difference to their pockets. Even as it is, a good deal of
unnecessary work is put upon the telegraph service by people spinning out
their messages to twelve words because they are not allowed to pay for less,
and they think they are not getting full value for their money if they say
what they have to say in six. It does not occur to them that they are wasting
their own time and that of the officials, besides increasing their taxes. It
seems a trifle; but public affairs consist of trifles multiplied by as many
millions as there are people in the country; and trifles cease to be trifles
when they are multiplied on that scale. Snowball letters, which seem a
kindly joke to the idiots who start them, would wreck our postal system if
sensible people did not conscientiously throw them into the waste paper
basket.
It is necessary to understand these things very clearly, because most people
are so simple and ignorant of big business matters that the private capitalists
are actually able to persuade them that Capitalism is a success because it
makes profits, and public service (or Communism) a failure because it
makes none. The simpletons forget that the profits come out of their own
pockets, and that what is the better for the private capitalists in this respect
is the worse for their customers, the disappearance of profit being simply
the disappearance of overcharge.

36
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

Y
OU now see how it is that the nation cannot depend on private
capital because there are so many vitally necessary things, from
town drainage to lighthouses, which it will not provide at all, and
how what it does provide it provides in the wrong order, refusing to make a
harbor until it has made as many distilleries as the trade will hold, and
building five luxurious houses for one rich person whilst a shocking
proportion of the nation’s children is dying of overcrowding in slums.
In short, the private capitalists, instead of doing the most desirable work
first, begin at the wrong end. All that can be said for this policy is that if
you begin at the wrong end you may be driven towards the right end when
you have done your worst and can get no further in the wrong direction; and
this is in fact the position into which our most respectable capitalists have
been forced by circumstances. When the poor have bought all the strong
drink they can afford to pay for, and the rich their racing stables and all the
pearls they can find room for on their wives’ necks, the capitalists are
forced to apply their next year’s accumulations of capital to the production
of more necessary things.
Before the hungry can be set to work building mills and making machinery
to equip them, somebody, possibly a woman, must invent the machinery.
The capitalists buy her invention. If she is good at business, which very few
inventors are, she makes them pay her enough to become a capitalist
herself; but in most cases she makes a very poor bargain, because she has to
sell the lion’s share in her invention for a few pounds to enable her to pay
for the necessary models and trials. It is only in modern Big Business that
inventiveness in method and organization superadded to mechanical
ingenuity has a chance against capital. If you have that talent the Big
Business people will not trouble to buy your patents: they will buy you at a
handsome price, and take you into the concern. But the simpleminded
mechanical inventor has no such luck. In any case, the capitalists have
made a communist law nationalizing all inventions after fourteen years,

when the capitalists can use them without paying the inventor anything.
They soon persuade themselves, or at least try to persuade others, that they
invented the machines themselves, and deserve their riches for their
ingenuity. Quite a number of people believe them.
Thus equipped with mechanical devices which are quite beyond the means
of small producers, the big capitalists begin to wipe the small producers off
the face of the earth. They seize on the work done by the handloom weaver
in his cottage, and do it much more cheaply in great mills full of expensive
machine looms driven by steam. They take the work of the oldtime miller
with his windmill or waterwheel, and do it in vast buildings with steel
rollers and powerful engines. They set up against the blacksmith a Nasmyth
hammer that a thousand Vulcans could not handle, and scissors that snip
sheet steel and bite off heavy bars more easily than he could open a tin of
condensed milk. They launch huge steel ships, driven by machinery which
the shipwrights who built for Columbus would have called devil’s work.
They raise houses in skyscraping piles of a hundred dwellings one on top of
another, in steel and concrete, so that in place of one horizontal street you
have bunches of perpendicular ones. They make lace by machinery, more of
it in a day than ten thousand women could make by hand. They make boots
by machinery, clocks by machinery, pins and needles by machinery. They
sell you machines to use yourself in your own house, such as vacuum
cleaners, to replace your old sweeping brush and tea leaves. They lay on the
electric power and hydraulic power that they use in their factories to your
house like water or gas; so that you can light and heat your house with it,
and have yourself carried in a lift from the basement to the attic and back
again without the trouble of climbing the stairs. You can boil your kettle and
cook your dinner with it. You could even make toast with it (they sell you a
little oven for the purpose) if it were not that you always forget to take the
toast out before it is burnt to a cinder.
Bad as the machine-made goods are at first compared to hand-made goods,
they end by being sometimes better, sometimes as good, sometimes as well
worth buying at the lower price, and always in the long run the only goods
you can get. For at last we forget how to make things by hand, and become
dependent on the bigger machine industries in spite of the little groups of
artists who try to keep the old handicrafts alive. When William Morris, a
great artist and craftsman, invented a story about the handle coming off a

rake in a village, and nobody knowing how to put it on again, so that they
had to get a big machine and eight engineers down from London to do it,
his tale was not at all so improbable as it would have been in the days of
Queen Anne. Our consolation is that if machinery makes rakes so cheap that
it is not worth while mending them instead of throwing them away and
going on with new ones, the loss is greater than the gain. And if the people
who work the machines have a better life of it than the old handy people,
then the change is for the better.
Mind: I do not say that these advantages are always gained at present. Most
of us are using cheap and nasty articles, and living a cheap and nasty life;
but this is not the fault of the machines and the great factories, nor of the
application of spare money to construct them: it is the fault of the unequal
distribution of the product and of the leisure gained by their saving of labor.
Now this misdistribution need not have occurred if the spare money had not
been in private hands. If it had been in the hands of national and municipal
banks controlling its use in the interest of all of us the capitalization of
industry on a large scale would have been an unmixed blessing, instead of
being, as it is at present, a blessing so mixed with curses of one kind or
another that in Samuel Butler’s famous Utopia, called Erewhon, the making
and even the possession of machinery is punished as a crime.
Some of our cleverest anti-Socialists advocate a return to the life of the
early eighteenth century, before the machines and factories came in. But
that would mean going back to the small population of that time, as the old
methods would not produce enough for our fortytwo millions. High
capitalization of industry, in which a million of spare money is spent to
provide us with fourpenny reels of cotton, has come to stay; but if
Socialism prevails, the million will be public and not private property, and
the reels will cost considerably less than twopence. To put it shortly,
capitalization is one thing, and Capitalism quite another. Capitalization does
not hurt us as long as capital is our servant and not our master. Capitalism
inevitably makes it our master instead of our servant. Instead of public
servants we are private slaves.
Note that the great change from cottage handicraft to factories and machine
industries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is called by economists
and historians The Industrial Revolution.

37
SENDING CAPITAL OUT OF THE COUNTRY

S
O far we have considered the growth of Capitalism as it occurs at
home. But capital has no home, or rather it is at home everywhere. It
is a quaint fact that though professed Socialists and Communists call
themselves Internationalists, and carry a red flag which is the flag of the
workers of all nations, and though most capitalists are boastfully national,
and wave the Union Jack on every possible occasion, yet when you come
down from the cries and catchwords to the facts, you find that every
practical measure advocated by British Socialists would have the effect of
keeping British capital in Britain to be spent on improving the condition of
their native country, whilst the British Capitalists are sending British capital
out of Britain to the ends of the earth by hundreds of millions every year. If,
with all our British spare money in their hands, they were compelled to
spend it in the British Isles, or were patriotic or public spirited or insular
enough to do so without being compelled, they could at least call
themselves patriots with some show of plausibility. Unfortunately we allow
them to spend it where they please; and their only preference, as we have
seen, is for the country in which it will yield them the largest income.
Consequently, when they have begun at the wrong end at home, and have
exhausted its possibilities, they do not move towards the right end until they
have exhausted the possibilities of the wrong end abroad as well.
Take the drink trade again as the most obvious example of the wrong end
being the most profitable end commercially.
It soon became so certain that free Capitalism in drink in England would
destroy England, that the Government was forced to interfere. Spirits can be
distilled so cheaply that it is quite possible to make a woman “drunk for a
penny: dead drunk for twopence”, and make a handsome profit by doing it.
When the capitalists were allowed to do this they did it without remorse,
having nothing to consider commercially but their profits. The Government
found that masses of people were poisoning, ruining, maddening
themselves with cheap gin. Accordingly a law was made by which every

distiller had to pay the Government so much money for every gallon of
strong drink he manufactured that he could make no profit unless he added
this tax to the price of the drink; and this made the drink so dear that though
there was still a great deal too much drunkenness, and working women
suffered because much more had to come out of the housekeeping money
for the men’s beer and spirits, yet the working people could not afford to
drink as recklessly and ruinously as they did in the days when Hogarth’s
picture of Gin Lane was painted.
In the United States of America the resistance of the Government to the
demoralization of the people by private traffic in drink has gone much
further. These States, after trying the plan of taxing strong drink, and
finding it impossible to stop excessive drinking in this way, were driven one
by one to a resolution to exterminate the trade altogether, until at last it was
prohibited in so many States that it became possible to make a Federal law
(that is, a law for all the States) prohibiting the sale or even the possession
of intoxicating liquor anywhere within the United States. The benefits of
this step were so immediate and so enormous that even the Americans who
buy drink from smugglers (bootleggers) whenever they can, vote steadily
for Prohibition; and so, of course, do the bootleggers, whose profits are
prodigious. Prohibition will sooner or later be forced on every Capitalist
country as a necessary defence against the ruinous effect of private
profiteering in drink. The only practicable alternative is the
municipalization of the drink trade: that is, socialism.
When our drink profiteers and their customers fill the newspapers with
stories about Prohibition being a failure in America, about all Americans
taking to drugs because they cannot get whiskey, about their drinking more
whiskey than ever, and when they quote a foolish saying of a former bishop
of Peterborough, that he would rather see England free than England sober
(as if a drunken man could be free in any sense, even if he escaped arrest by
the police), you must bear in mind the fact, never mentioned by them, that
millions of Americans who have never been drunk in their lives, and who
do not believe that their moderate use of the intoxicants they have found
pleasant has ever done them the slightest harm, have yet voted away this
indulgence for the general good of their country and in the interests of
human dignity and civilization. Remember also that our profiteers have
engaged in the smuggling trade, and actually tried to represent the measures

taken against it by the American Government as attacks on British liberties.
If America were as weak militarily as China was in 1840 they would drive
us into a war to force whiskey on America.
Do not, however, rush to the conclusion that Prohibition, because it is a
violently effective method of combating unscrupulous profiteering in drink,
is an ideal method of dealing with the drink question. It is not certain that
there would be any drink question if we got rid of capitalism. We shall
consider that later on: our present point is simply that capital has no
conscience and no country. Capitalism, beaten in a civilized country by
Prohibition, can send its capital abroad to an uncivilized one where it can
do what it likes. Our capitalists wiped multitudes of black men out of
existence with gin when they were forcibly prevented by law from doing
the same to their own countrymen. They would have made Africa a desert
white with the bones of drunkards had they not discovered that more profit
could be made by selling men and women than by poisoning them. The
drink trade was rich; but the slave trade was richer. Huge profits were made
by kidnapping shiploads of negroes and selling them as slaves. Cities like
Bristol have been built upon that black foundation. White queens put money
into it. The slave trade would still be a British trade if it had not been
forbidden by law through the efforts of British philanthropists who, with
their eyes in the ends of the earth, did not know that British children were
being overworked and beaten in British factories as cruelly as the negro
children in the plantations.
If you are a softhearted person, be careful not to lose your head as you read
of these horrors. Virtuous indignation is a powerful stimulant, but a
dangerous diet. Keep in mind the old proverb: anger is a bad counsellor.
Our capitalists did not begin in this way as perversely wicked people. They
did not soil their own hands with the work. Their hands were often the
white hands of refined, benevolent, cultivated ladies of the highest rank. All
they did or could do was to invest their spare money in the way that brought
them the largest income. If milk had paid better than gin, or converting
negroes to Christianity better than converting them into slaves, they would
have traded in milk and Bibles just as willingly, or rather just as helplessly,
as in gin and slaves.
When the gin trade was overdone and exhausted, and the slave trade
suppressed, they went on into ordinary industrial work, and found that

profits could be made by employing slaves as well as by kidnapping and
selling them. They used their political power to induce the British
Government to annex great tracts of Africa, and to impose on the natives
taxes which they could not possibly pay except by working for the
capitalists like English working men, only at lower wages and without the
protection of English Factory Acts and English public opinion. Great
fortunes were made in this way. The Empire was enlarged: “trade followed
the flag” they said, meaning that the flag followed trade and then more
trade followed the flag; British capital developed the world everywhere
(except at home); the newspapers declared that it was all very splendid; and
generals like Lord Roberts expressed their belief that God meant that three-
quarters of the earth should be ruled by young gentlemen from our public
schools, in which schools, by the way, nothing whatever was done to
explain to them what this outrageous pillage of their own country for the
development of the rest of the earth really meant over and above the
temporary enrichment of their own small class.
Nothing in our political history is more appalling than the improvidence
with which we have allowed British spare money, desperately needed at
home for the full realization of our own powers of production, and for the
clearing away of our disgraceful slum centres of social corruption, to be
driven abroad at the rate of two hundred millions every year, loading us
with unemployed, draining us by emigration, imposing huge military and
naval forces upon us, strengthening the foreign armies of which we are
afraid, and providing all sorts of facilities for the foreign industries which
destroy our powers of self-support by doing for us what we could and
should do just as well for ourselves. If a fraction of the British spare money
our capitalists have spent in providing South America with railways and
mines and factories had been spent in making roads to our natural harbors
and turning to account the gigantic wasted water power of the tideways and
torrents of barren savage coasts in Scotland and Ireland, or even in putting
an end to such capitalistic absurdities as the sending of farm produce from
one English county to another by way of America, we should not now be
complaining that the countries our spare money has developed can
undersell our merchants and throw our workers on public charity for want
of employment.

38
DOLES, DEPOPULATION, AND PARASITIC PARADISES

I
BECAME a little rhetorical at the end of the last chapter, as Socialists
will when they have, like myself, acquired the habit of public speaking.
I hope I have not carried you away so far as to make you overlook in
your indignation the fact that, whilst all these dreadful things have been
going on, the profits of the capital which has gone abroad are coming into
the country gratuitously (imports without equivalent exports) and being
spent here by the capitalists, and that their expenditure gives employment.
The capital went out; but the income comes in; and the question arises, are
we any the worse for being pampered paupers, living on the labor of other
nations? If the money that is coming in in income is more than went out as
capital, are we not better off?
One’s impulse is to say certainly not, because the same money spent as
capital at home would have brought us in just as large an income, and
perhaps larger, than it fetches from abroad, though the capitalists might not
have got so much of it. Indeed they might have got none of it if it had been
spent in great public works like clearing slums, embanking rivers,
roadmaking, smoke abatement, free schools and universities, and other
good things that cannot be charged for except communistically through
rates and taxes. But the question is more complicated than that.
Suppose yourself a mill hand in a factory, accustomed to tend a machine
there, and to live with your people in a poor quarter of a manufacturing
town. Suddenly you find yourself discharged, and the factory shut up,
because the trade has mysteriously gone abroad. You find that mill hands
are not wanted, but that there is a scarcity of lady’s maids, of assistants in
fashionable shops, of waitresses in week-end motoring hotels, of
stewardesses in palatial steamships, of dressmakers, of laundresses, of fine
cooks (hidden in the kitchen and spoken of as “the chef”), of all sorts of
women whose services are required by idle rich people. But you cannot get
one of these jobs because you do not know the work, and are not the sort of
person, and have not the speech, dress, and manners which are considered

indispensable. After a spell of starvation and despair you find a job in a
chocolate cream factory or a jam and pickles works, or you become a
charwoman. And if you have a daughter you bring her up to the chocolate
cream or lady’s maid business, and not to weaving and spinning.
It is possible that in the end your daughter may be better paid, better
dressed, more gently spoken, more ladylike than you were in the old mill.
You may come to thank God that some Indian, or Chinaman, or negro, or
simply some foreigner is doing the work you used to do, and setting your
daughter free to do something that is considered much more genteel and is
better paid and more respected. Your son may be doing better as a trainer of
racehorses than his father did as a steel smelter, and be ever so much more
the gentleman. You might, if you lived long enough, see the ugly factory
towns of the Manchester and Sheffield and Birmingham districts, and of the
Potteries, disappear and be replaced by nice residential towns and pleasure
resorts like Bournemouth, Cheltenham, and the Malverns. You might see
the valleys of Wales recover the beauty they had before the mines spoiled
them. And it would be quite natural for you to call these changes prosperity,
and vote for them, and sincerely loathe anyone who warned you that all it
meant was that the nation, having become a parasite on foreign labor, was
going to the devil as fast as it could.
Yet the warning would be much needed. If a nation turns its rough mill
hands into well-educated, well-dressed, well-spoken, ladylike mill officials,
properly respected, and given a fair share of the wealth they help to
produce, the nation is the stronger, the richer, the happier, and the holier for
the change. If it turns them into lady’s maids and sellers of twenty-guinea
hats, it breaks its own backbone and exchanges its page in honorable history
for a chapter in The Ruins of Empires. It becomes too idle and luxurious to
be able to compel the foreign countries to pay the tribute on which it lives;
and when they cease to feed it, it has lost the art of feeding itself and
collapses in the midst of its genteel splendor.
But this dismal sketch of the future of countries that let themselves become
dependent on the labor of other countries and settle down into a
comfortable and ladylike parasitism is really much too favorable. If all our
factory foremen could be turned into headwaiters with a touch of
Cinderella’s godmother’s wand, neither they nor their wives might object.
But this is not what happens. The factory foreman may bring up his son to

be a waiter; but he himself becomes an unemployed man. If he is not fit for
any of the new jobs, and too old to learn, and his trade is not merely going
through one of the usual periods of depression but has left the country for
good, he becomes a permanently unemployed man, and consequently a
starving man. Now a starving man is a dangerous man, no matter how
respectable his political opinions may be. A man who has had his dinner is
never a revolutionist: his politics are all talk. But hungry men, rather than
die of starvation, will, when there are enough of them to overpower the
police, begin by rioting, and end by plundering and burning rich men’s
houses, upsetting the government, and destroying civilization. And the
women, sooner than see their children starve, will make the men do it, small
blame to them.
Consequently the capitalists, when they have sent their capital abroad
instead of giving continuous employment with it at home, and are
confronted at home with masses of desperate men for whom they can find
no suitable jobs, must either feed them for nothing or face a revolution. And
so you get what we call the dole. Now small as the dole may be it must be
sufficient to live on; and if two or three in one household put their doles
together, they grow less keen on finding employment, and develop a taste
for living like ladies and gentlemen: that is, amusing themselves at the
expense of others instead of earning anything. We used to moralize over this
sort of thing as part of the decline and fall of ancient Rome; but we have
been heading straight for it ourselves for a long while past, and the war has
plunged us into it head over ears. For it was after the war that the capitalists
failed to find employment for no less than two million demobilized soldiers
who had for four years been not only well fed and clothed, but trained in the
handling of weapons whilst occupied in slaughtering, burning, destroying,
and facing terrible risks of being themselves destroyed. If these men had not
been given money to live on they would have taken it by violence.
Accordingly the Government had to take millions of spare money from the
capitalists and give it to the demobilized men; and they are still doing so,
with the grudged consent of the capitalists themselves, who complain
bitterly, but fear that if they refuse they will lose everything.
At this point Capitalism becomes desperate, and quite openly engages in
attempts to get rid of the unemployed: that is, to empty the country of part
of its population, which it calls overpopulation. How is it to be done? As the

unemployed will not let themselves be starved, still less will they let
themselves be gassed or poisoned or shot, which would be the logical
Capitalist way out of the mess. But they can perhaps be induced to leave the
country and try their luck elsewhere if the Government will pay the fare, or
as much of it as they cannot scrape up themselves. As I write these lines the
Government announces that if any Englishwoman or Englishman will be so
kind as to clear out of England to the other side of the world it will cost
them only three pounds apiece instead of five times that sum, as the
Government will provide the odd twelve pounds. And if sufficient numbers
do not jump at this offer before these lines are printed, the Government may
be driven to offer to send them away for nothing and give them ten pounds
apiece to start with in their new country. That would be cheaper than
keeping them at home on the dole.
Thus we see Capitalism producing the amazing and fantastic result that the
people of the country become a drawback to it, and have to be got rid of
like vermin (polite people call the process Assisted Emigration), leaving
nobody in it but capitalists and landlords and their attendants, living on
imported food and manufactures in an elegant manner, and realizing the
lady’s and gentleman’s dream of a country in which there is lavish
consumption and no production, stately parks and palatial residences
without factories or mines or smoke or slums or any unpleasantness that
heaps of gratuitous money can prevent, and contraception in full swing to
avoid any further increase in the population.
Surely, you will say, if Capitalism leads to this, it leads to an earthly
paradise. Leaving out of account the question whether the paradise, if
realized, would not be a fool’s paradise (for, I am sorry to say, we have all
been brought up to regard such a state of things as the perfection of human
society), and admitting that something like it has been half realized in spots
in many places from Monte Carlo to Gleneagles, and from Gleneagles to
Palm Beach, it is never realized for a whole country. It has often been
carried far enough to reduce powerful empires like Rome and Spain to a
state of demoralized impotence in which they were broken up and
plundered by the foreigners on whom they had allowed themselves to
become dependent; but it never has, and never can, build up a stable
Parasitic State in which all the workers are happy and contented because
they share the riches of the capitalists, and are kept healthy and pleasant and

nice because the capitalists are cultivated enough to dislike seeing slums
and shabby ugly people and running the risk of catching infectious diseases
from them. When capitalists are intelligent enough to care whether the
whole community is healthy and pleasant and happy or not, even when the
unpleasantnesses do not come under their own noses, they become
Socialists, for the excellent reason that there is no fun in being a capitalist if
you have to take care of your servants and tradesmen (which means sharing
your income with them) as affectionately as if they were your own family.
If your taste and conscience were cultivated to that extent you would find
such a responsibility unbearable, because you would have to be continually
thinking of others, not only to the necessary and possible extent of taking
care that your own activities and conveniences did not clash unreasonably
and unkindly with theirs, but to the unnecessary and impossible extent of
doing all the thinking for them that they ought to do, and in freedom could
do, for themselves. It is easy to say that servants should be treated well not
only because humanity requires it but because they will otherwise be
unpleasant and dishonest and inefficient servants. But if you treat your
servants as well as you treat yourself, which really amounts to spending as
much money on them as on yourself, what is the use of having servants?
They become a positive burden, expecting you to be a sort of Earthly
Providence to them, which means that you spend half your time thinking for
them and the other half talking about them. Being able to call your servants
your own is a very poor compensation for not being able to call your soul
your own. That is why, even as it is, you run away from your comfortable
house to live in hotels (if you can afford it), because, when you have paid
your bill and tipped the waiter and the chambermaid, you are finished with
them, and have not to be a sort of matriarch to them as well.
Anyhow, most of those who are ministering to your wants are not in
personal contact with you. They are the employees of your tradesmen; and
as your tradesmen trade capitalistically, you have inequality of income,
unemployment, sweating, division of society into classes, with the resultant
dysgenic restrictions on marriage, and all the other evils which prevent a
capitalist society from achieving peace or permanence. A self-contained,
self-supporting Capitalism would at least be safe from being starved out as
Germany was in the war in spite of her military successes; but a completely
parasitic Capitalism, however fashionable, would be simply Capitalism
with that peril intensified to the utmost.

39
FOREIGN TRADE AND THE FLAG

N
OW let us turn back to inquire whether sending our capital abroad,
and consenting to be taxed to pay emigration fares to get rid of the
women and men who are left without employment in consequence,
is all that Capitalism can do when our employers, who act for our capitalists
in industrial affairs, and are more or less capitalists themselves in the earlier
stages of capitalistic development, find that they can sell no more of their
goods at a profit, or indeed at all, in their own country.
Clearly they cannot send abroad the capital they have already invested,
because it has all been eaten up by the workers, leaving in its place factories
and railways and mines and the like; and these cannot be packed into a
ship’s hold and sent to Africa. It is only the freshly saved capital that can be
sent out of the country. This, as we have seen, does go abroad in heaps. But
the British employer who is working with capital in the shape of works
fixed to British land held by him on long lease, must, when once he has sold
all the goods at home that his British customers can afford to buy, either
shut up his works until the customers have worn out their stock of what
they have bought, which would bankrupt him (for the landlord will not
wait), or else sell his superfluous goods somewhere else: that is, he must
send them abroad.
Now it is not so easy to send them to civilized countries, because they
practise Protection, which means that they impose heavy taxes (customs
duties) on foreign goods. Uncivilized countries, without Protection, and
inhabited by natives to whom gaudy calicoes and cheap showy brass ware
are dazzling and delightful novelties, are the best places to make for at first.
But trade requires a settled government to put down the habit of plundering
strangers. This is not a habit of simple tribes, who are often friendly and
honest. It is what civilized men do where there is no law to restrain them.
Until quite recent times it was extremely dangerous to be wrecked on our
own coasts, as wrecking, which meant plundering wrecked ships and
refraining from any officious efforts to save the lives of their crews, was a

well-established business in many places on our shores. The Chinese still
remember some astonishing outbursts of looting perpetrated by English
ladies of high position, at moments when law was suspended and priceless
works of art were to be had for the grabbing. When trading with aborigines
begins with the visit of a single ship, the cannons and cutlasses it carries
may be quite sufficient to overawe the natives if they are troublesome. The
real difficulty begins when so many ships come that a little trading station
of white men grows up and attracts the white ne’er-do-wells and violent
roughs who are always being squeezed out of civilization by the pressure of
law and order. It is these riffraff who turn the place into a sort of hell in
which sooner or later missionaries are murdered and traders plundered.
Their home Governments are appealed to to put a stop to this. A gunboat is
sent out and an inquiry made. The report after the inquiry is that there is
nothing to be done but set up a civilized government, with a post office,
police, troops, and a navy in the offing. In short, the place is added to some
civilized Empire. And the civilized taxpayer pays the bill without getting a
farthing of the profits.
Of course the business does not stop there. The riffraff who have created the
emergency move out just beyond the boundary of the annexed territory, and
are as great a nuisance as ever to the traders when they have exhausted the
purchasing power of the included natives and push on after fresh customers.
Again they call on their home Government to civilize a further area; and so
bit by bit the civilized Empire grows at the expense of the home taxpayers,
without any intention or approval on their part, until at last, though all their
real patriotism is centred on their own people and confined to their own
country, their own rulers, and their own religious faith, they find that the
centre of their beloved realm has shifted to the other hemisphere. That is
how we in the British Islands have found our centre moved from London to
the Suez Canal, and are now in the position that out of every hundred of our
fellow-subjects, in whose defence we are expected to shed the last drop of
our blood, only eleven are whites or even Christians. In our bewilderment
some of us declare that the Empire is a burden and a blunder, whilst others
glory in it as a triumph. You and I need not argue with them just now, our
point for the moment being that, whether blunder or glory, the British
Empire was quite unintentional. What should have been undertaken only as
a most carefully considered political development has been a series of
commercial adventures thrust on us by capitalists forced by their own

system to cater for foreign customers before their own country’s needs were
one-tenth satisfied.

40
EMPIRES IN COLLISION

I
F the British Empire were the only State on earth, the process might go
on peacefully (except for ordinary police coercion) until the whole earth
was civilized under the British flag. This is the dream of British
Imperialism. But it is not what the world is like. There are all the other
States, large and small, with their Imperialist dreamers and their very
practical traders pushing for foreign markets, and their navies and armies to
back the traders and annex these markets. Sooner or later, as they push their
boundaries into Africa and Asia, they come up against oneanother. A
collision of that kind (called the Fashoda incident) very nearly involved us
in a war with France. Fortunately France gave way, not being prepared to
fight us just then; but France and Britain were left with the whole Sudan
divided between them. France had before this pushed into and annexed
Algeria and (virtually) Tunisia; and Spain was pushing into Morocco. Italy,
alarmed lest there should be nothing left for her, made a dash at Tripoli and
annexed it. England was in Egypt as well as in India.
Now imagine yourself for a moment a German trader, with more goods than
you can sell in Germany, having either to shut up your factory and be
ruined, or find a foreign market in Africa. Imagine yourself looking at the
map of Africa. The entire Mediterranean coast, the pick of the basket, is
English, Italian, French, and Spanish. The Hinterland, as you call it, is
English and French. You cannot get in anywhere without going through the
English Suez Canal or round the Cape to some remote place down south.
Do you now understand what the German Kaiser meant when he
complained that Germany had not been left “a place in the sun”? That
hideous war of 1914-18 was at bottom a fight between the capitalists of
England, France, and Italy on the one side, and those of Germany on the
other, for command of the African markets. On top, of course, it was about
other things: about Austria making the murder of the Archduke a pretext for
subjugating Serbia; about Russia mobilizing against Austria to prevent this;
about Germany being dragged into the Austro-Russian quarrel by her
alliance with Austria; about France being dragged in on the other side by

her alliance with Russia; about the German army having to make a
desperate attempt to conquer the French army before the Russian troops
could reach her; about England having to attack Germany because she was
allied to France and Russia; and about the German army having taken the
shortest cut through Belgium, not knowing that Belgium had a secret
arrangement with England to have a British expedition sent to defend her if
Germany invaded her. Of course the moment the first shot was fired all the
Britons and Belgians and Germans and French and Austrians and Russians
became enraged sheep, and imagined all sorts of romantic reasons for
fighting, in addition to the solid reason that if Tommy and the Poilu and
Ivan did not kill Hans and Fritz, Hans and Fritz would kill Tommy and the
Poilu and Ivan. Before the killing had gone on very long, the Turks, the
Bulgarians, the Japanese, the Americans, and other States that had no more
to do with the first quarrel than you had, were in it and at it hammer and
tongs. The whole world went mad, and never alluded to markets except
when they ridiculed the Kaiser for his demand for a place in the sun.
Yet there would have been no war without the alliances; and the alliances
could not have fought if they had not set up great armaments, especially the
new German navy, to protect their foreign markets and frontiers. These
armaments, created to produce a sense of security, had produced a sense of
terror in which no nation dared go unarmed unless it was too small to have
any chance against the great Powers, and could depend on their jealousy of
oneanother to stave off a conquest by any one of them. Soon the nations
that dared not go unarmed became more terrified still, and dared not go
alone: they had to form alliances and go in twos and threes, like policemen
in thieves’ quarters, Germany and Austria in one group and England,
France, and Russia in another, both trying to induce Italy and Turkey and
America to join them. Their differences were not about their own countries:
the German navy was not built to bombard Portsmouth nor the British navy
to bombard Bremerhaven. But when the German navy interfered in the
north of Africa, which was just what it was built for, and the French and
British navies frightened it off from that market in the sun, the capitalist
diplomatists of these nations saw that the first thing to concentrate on was
not the markets but the sinking of the German navy by the combined French
and British navies (or vice versa) on any available pretext. And as you
cannot have fleets fighting on the sea without armies fighting on the land to
help them, the armies grew like the fleets; the Race of Armaments became

as familiar as the Derby; all the natural and kindly sentiments of white
civilized nations towards oneanother were changed into blustering terror,
the parent of hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness; and after all, when the
explosive mixture blew up at last, and blew millions of us with it, it was not
about the African markets, but about a comparatively trumpery quarrel
between Austria and Serbia which the other Powers could have settled with
the greatest ease, without the shedding of one drop of blood, if they had
been on decent human terms with oneanother instead of on competitive
capitalistic terms.
And please do not fail to note that whereas in the early days of Capitalism
our capitalists did not compel us to fight for their markets with our own
hands, but hired German serfs and British voluntary professional soldiers
for the job, their wars have now become so colossal that every woman’s
husband, father, son, brother, or sweetheart, if young and strong enough to
carry a rifle, must go to the trenches as helplessly as cattle go to the
slaughterhouse, abandoning wife and children, home and business, and
renouncing normal morality and humanity, pretending all the time that such
conduct is splendid and heroic and that his name will live for ever, though
he may have the greatest horror of war, and be perfectly aware that the
enemy’s soldiers, against whom he is defending his hearth, are in exactly
the same predicament as himself, and would never dream of injuring him or
his if the pressure of the drive for markets were removed from both.
I have purposely brought you to the question of war because your
conscience must be sorely troubled about it. You have seen the men of
Europe rise up and slaughter oneanother in the most horrible manner in
millions. Your son, perhaps, has received a military cross for venturing into
the air in a flying machine and dropping a bomb on a sleeping village,
blowing several children into fragments, and mutilating or killing their
parents. From a militarist, nationalist, or selfishly patriotic point of view
such deeds may appear glorious exploits; but from the point of view of any
universally valid morality: say from the point of view of a God who is the
father of Englishmen and Germans, Frenchmen and Turks alike, they must
seem outbursts of the most infernal wickedness. As such they have caused
many of us to despair of human nature. A bitter cynicism has succeeded to
transports of pugnacious hatred of which all but the incorrigibly
thoughtless, and a few incurables who have been mentally disabled for life

by the war fever, are now heartily ashamed. I can hardly believe that you
have escaped your share of this crushing disillusion. If you are human as
well as intelligent you must feel about your species very much as the King
of Brobdingnag did when he took Gulliver in his hand as a child takes a tin
soldier, and heard his boastful patriotic discourse about the glories of
military history.
Perhaps I can console you a little. If you will look at the business in the
light of what we have just been studying I think you will see that the fault
lay not so much in our characters as in the capitalist system which we had
allowed to dominate our lives until it became a sort of blind monster which
neither we nor the capitalists could control. It is absurd to pretend that the
young men of Europe ever wanted to hunt each other into holes in the
ground and throw bombs into the holes to disembowel oneanother, or to
have to hide in those holes themselves, eaten with lice and sickened by the
decay of the unburied, in unutterable discomfort, boredom, and
occasionally acute terror, or that any woman ever wanted to put on her best
Sunday clothes and be gratified at the honor done to her son for killing
some other woman’s babies. The capitalists and their papers try to persuade
themselves and us that we are like that and always will be, in spite of all the
Christmas cards and Leagues of Nations. It is not a bit true. The staggering
fact about all these horrors was that we found ourselves compelled to do
them in spite of the fact that they were so unintended by us, and so
repugnant and dreadful to us that, when at last the war suddenly stopped,
our heroic pretences dropped from us like blown-off hats, and we danced in
the streets for weeks, mad with joy, until the police had to stop us to restore
the necessary traffic. We still celebrate, by two minutes’ national silence,
not the day on which the glorious war broke out, but the day on which the
horrible thing came to an end. Not the victory, which we have thrown away
by abusing it as helplessly as we fought for it, but the Armistice, the
Cessation, the stoppage of the Red Cross vans from the terminuses of the
Channel railways with their heartbreaking loads of mutilated men, was what
we danced for so wildly and pitifully. If ever there was anything made clear
in the world it was that we were no more directly guilty of the war than we
were guilty of the earthquake of Tokio. We and the French and the Germans
and the Turks and the rest found ourselves conscripted for an appalling
slaughtering match, ruinous to ourselves, ruinous to civilization, and so
dreaded by the capitalists themselves that it was only by an extraordinary

legal suspension of all financial obligations (called the Moratorium) that the
City was induced to face it. The attempt to fight out the war with volunteers
failed: there were not enough. The rest went because they were forced to
go, and fought because they were forced to fight. The women let them go
partly because they could not help themselves, partly because they were just
as pugnacious as the men, partly because they read the papers (which were
not allowed to tell them the truth), and partly because most of them were so
poor that they grasped at the allowances which left most of them better off
with their husbands in the trenches than they had ever been with their
husbands at home.
How had they got into this position? Simply by the original sin of allowing
their countries to be moved and governed and fed and clothed by the pursuit
of profit for capitalists instead of by the pursuit of righteous prosperity for
“all people that on earth do dwell”. The first ship that went to Africa to sell
things to the natives at more than cost price because there was no sale for
them at home began not only this war, but the other and worse wars that
will follow it if we persist in depending on Capitalism for our livelihood
and our morals. All these monstrous evils begin in a small and apparently
harmless way. It is not too much to say that when a nation, having five
shillings to divide-up, gives four to Fanny and one to Sarah instead of
giving half a crown to each and seeing that she earns it, it sows the seed of
all the evils that now make thoughtful and farseeing men speak of our
capitalistic civilization as a disease instead of a blessing.

41
THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE

D
O not, however, disparage foreign trade. There is nothing wrong
with foreign trade as such. We could have no gold without foreign
trade; and gold has all sorts of uses and all sorts of beauties. I will
not add that we could have no tea, because I happen to think that we should
be better without this insidious Chinese stimulant. It is safer and probably
healthier for a nation to live on the food and drink it can itself produce, as
the Esquimaux manage to do under much harder conditions. But there are
many necessaries of a high civilization that nations cannot find within their
own boundaries, and must buy from oneanother. We must trade and travel
and come to know oneanother all over the habitable globe. We have to
make international institutions as well as national ones, beginning with
Trading Treaties and Postal Conventions and Copyright Conventions, and
going on to the Leagues of Nations. The necessities of travelling and trade,
and the common interest of all nations in the works and discoveries of art,
literature, and science, have forced them to make international agreements
and treaties with oneanother which are making an end of “keeping
ourselves to ourselves”, and throwing half bricks at foreigners and
strangers. Honest foreign trade would never have got us into trouble.
Neither is the combination of little States in great Federations and
Commonwealths undesirable: on the contrary, the fewer frontiers the better.
The establishment of law and order in uncivilized places should not have
made us hated there: it should have made us popular; and it often did—at
first. The annexation of other countries under our flag, when it was really
needed, should have been a welcome privilege and a strengthening
partnership for the inhabitants of the annexed regions. Indeed we have
always pretended that this was actually the case, and that we were in
foreign countries for the good of the inhabitants and not for our own sake.
Unfortunately we never could make these pretensions good in the long run.
However noble the aspirations of our Imperialist idealists might be, our
capitalist traders were there to make as much profit out of the inhabitants as
they could, and for no other purpose. They had abandoned their own

country because there was no more profit to be made there, or not so much;
and it is not to be expected that they would become idealistically
disinterested the moment they landed on foreign shores. They stigmatized
the Stay-at-homes, the anti-Expansionists, the Little-Englanders, as friends
of every country but their own; but they themselves were the enemies of
every country, including their own, where there was a sweatable laborer to
make dividends for them. They pretended that the civilization of the
annexed country was “the white man’s burden”, and posed as weary Titans
reluctantly shouldering the public work of other nations as a duty imposed
on them by Providence; but when the natives, having been duly civilized,
declared that they were now quite ready to govern themselves, the
capitalists held on to their markets as an eagle holds on to its prey, and,
throwing off their apostolic mask, defended their annexations with fire and
sword. They said they would fight to the last drop of their blood for “the
integrity of the Empire”; and they did in fact pay many thousands of hungry
men to fight to that extremity. In spite of them half of North America broke
loose, after a war which left a volcano of hatred that is still smouldering and
winning Chicago elections after a century of American independence.
Roman Catholic Ireland, South Africa, and Egypt have extorted self-
government from us. India is doing the same. But they do not thank us for
it, knowing how loth our Capitalism was to let them go.
On the other hand look at Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. We did not
dare coerce them after our failure in North America. We provide a costly
fleet gratuitously to protect their shores from invasion. We give them
preferences in trade whilst allowing them to set up heavy protective duties
against us. We allow them to be represented at international congresses as if
they were independent nations. We even allow them access to the King
independently of the London Cabinet. The result is that they hang on to us
with tyrannical devotion, waving the Union Jack as enthusiastically as the
Americans wave the Stars and Stripes. And this is not because they are of
our own race. The Americans were that; yet they broke away; so were the
Irish and their leaders. The French Canadians, who are of the same race
with us only in the sense that we all belong to the human race, cling to us
just as hard. They all follow us to war so boldly that we begin to have
misgivings as to whether someday they may not make us follow them to
war. The last land to strike for independence of the British Empire may be

Protestant England herself, with Ulster and Scotland for allies, and the Irish
Free State heading her Imperialist opponents.
But Capitalism can be depended on to spoil all these reconciliations and
loyalties. True, we no longer exploit colonies capitalistically: we allow
them to do it for themselves, and to call the process self-government. Whilst
we persisted in governing them they blamed us for all the evils Capitalism
brought upon them; and they finally refused to endure our government.
When we left them to govern themselves they became less and less hostile
to us. But the change always impoverishes them, and leaves them in
comparative disorder. The capitalistic evils for which they blamed us still
oppress them. Their self-government is more tyrannical than our alien
government ever dared to be. Their new relation to the Imperial State
becomes more dangerously strained than the old relation, precisely as the
relation of England to Germany was more dangerously strained in 1913
than the relation of England to Ireland. The most liberal allowance of self-
government cannot reconcile people as long as their capitalists are
competing for markets. Nationalism may make Frenchmen and
Englishmen, Englishmen and Irishmen, savage enemies when it is
infringed. Frenchmen and Irishmen laid their own countries waste to get rid
of English rule. But Capitalism makes all men enemies all the time without
distinction of race, color, or creed. When all the nations have freed
themselves Capitalism will make them fight more furiously than ever, if we
are fools enough to let it.
Have you ever seen the curiosity called a Prince Rupert’s Drop? It is a bead
of glass in such a state of internal strain that if you break off the tiniest
corner the whole bead flies violently to bits. Europe was like that in 1914. A
handful of people in Serbia committed a murder, and the next moment half
Europe was murdering the other half. This frightful condition of internal
strain and instability was not set up by human nature: it was, I repeat,
intensely repugnant to human nature, being a condition of chronic terror
that at last became unbearable, like that of a woman who commits suicide
because she can no longer endure the dread of death. It was set up by
Capitalism. Capitalism, you will say, is at bottom nothing but covetousness;
and covetousness is human nature. That is true; but covetousness is not the
whole of human nature; it is only a part, and one that vanishes when it is
satisfied, like hunger after a meal, up to which point it is wholesome and

necessary. Under Capitalism it becomes a dread of poverty and slavery,
which are neither wholesome nor necessary. And, as we have just seen,
capital is carried by its own nature beyond the control of both human
covetousness and human conscience, marching on blindly and
automatically, until we find on the one hand the masses of mankind
condemned to poverty relieved only by horrible paroxysms of bloodshed,
and on the other a handful of hypertrophied capitalists gasping under the
load of their growing millions, and giving it away in heaps in a desperate
attempt, partly to get rid of it without being locked up as madmen for
throwing it into the sea, and partly to undo, by founding Rockefeller
institutes and Carnegie libraries, and hospitals and universities and schools
and churches, the effects of the welter of ignorance and poverty produced
by the system under which it has accumulated on their hands. To call these
unfortunate billionaires monsters of covetousness in the face of their wild
disgorgings (to say nothing of their very ordinary portraits) is silly. They are
rather to be compared to the sorcerer’s apprentice who called up a demon to
fetch a drink for him, and, not knowing the spell for stopping him when he
had brought enough, was drowned in an ocean of wine.

42
HOW WEALTH ACCUMULATES AND MEN DECAY

I
WANT to stress this personal helplessness we are all stricken with in the
face of a system that has passed beyond our knowledge and control. To
bring it nearer home, I propose that we switch off from the big things
like empires and their wars to little familiar things. Take pins for example! I
do not know why it is that I so seldom use a pin when my wife cannot get
on without boxes of them at hand; but it is so; and I will therefore take pins
as being for some reason specially important to women.
There was a time when pinmakers could buy the material; shape it; make
the head and the point; ornament it; and take it to market or to your door
and sell it to you. They had to know three trades: buying, making, and
selling; and the making required skill in several operations. They not only
knew how the thing was done from beginning to end, but could do it. But
they could not afford to sell you a paper of pins for a farthing. Pins cost so
much that a woman’s dress allowance was called pin money.
By the end of the eighteenth century Adam Smith boasted that it took
eighteen men to make a pin, each man doing a little bit of the job and
passing the pin on to the next, and none of them being able to make a whole
pin or to buy the materials or to sell it when it was made. The most you
could say for them was that at least they had some idea of how it was made,
though they could not make it. Now as this meant that they were clearly less
capable and knowledgeable men than the old pinmakers, you may ask why
Adam Smith boasted of it as a triumph of civilization when its effect was so
clearly a degrading effect. The reason was that by setting each man to do
just one little bit of the work and nothing but that, over and over again, he
became very quick at it. The men, it is said, could turn out nearly five
thousand pins a day each; and thus pins became plentiful and cheap. The
country was supposed to be richer because it had more pins, though it had
turned capable men into mere machines doing their work without
intelligence, and being fed by the spare food of the capitalist as an engine is
fed with coals and oil. That was why the poet Goldsmith, who was a

farsighted economist as well as a poet, complained that “wealth
accumulates, and men decay”.
Nowadays Adam Smith’s eighteen men are as extinct as the diplodocus. The
eighteen flesh-and-blood machines are replaced by machines of steel which
spout out pins by the hundred million. Even sticking them into pink papers
is done by machinery. The result is that with the exception of a few people
who design the machines, nobody knows how to make a pin or how a pin is
made: that is to say, the modern worker in pin manufacture need not be one-
tenth so intelligent and skilful and accomplished as the old pinmaker; and
the only compensation we have for this deterioration is that pins are so
cheap that a single pin has no expressible value at all. Even with a big profit
stuck on to the cost-price you can buy dozens for a farthing; and pins are so
recklessly thrown away and wasted that verses have to be written to
persuade children (without success) that it is a sin to steal a pin.
Many serious thinkers, like John Ruskin and William Morris, have been
greatly troubled by this, just as Goldsmith was, and have asked whether we
really believe that it is an advance in wealth to lose our skill and degrade
our workers for the sake of being able to waste pins by the ton. We shall see
later on, when we come to consider the Distribution of Leisure, that the cure
for this is not to go back to the old ways; for if the saving of time by
modern machinery were equally divided among us, it would set us all free
for higher work than pinmaking or the like. But in the meantime the fact
remains that pins are now made by men and women who cannot make
anything by themselves, and could not arrange between themselves to make
anything even in little bits. They are ignorant and helpless, and cannot lift
their finger to begin their day’s work until it has all been arranged for them
by their employers, who themselves do not understand the machines they
buy, and simply pay other people to set them going by carrying out the
machine maker’s directions.
The same is true of clothes. Formerly the whole work of making clothes,
from the shearing of the sheep to the turning out of the finished and washed
garment ready to put on, had to be done in the country by the men and
women of the household, especially the women; so that to this day an
unmarried woman is called a spinster. Nowadays nothing is left of all this
but the sheep-shearing; and even that, like the milking of cows, is being
done by machinery, as the sewing is. Give a woman a sheep today and ask

her to produce a woollen dress for you; and not only will she be quite
unable to do it, but you are as likely as not to find that she is not even aware
of any connection between sheep and clothes. When she gets her clothes,
which she does by buying them at a shop, she knows that there is a
difference between wool and cotton and silk, between flannel and merino,
perhaps even between stockinet and other wefts; but as to how they are
made, or what they are made of, or how they came to be in the shop ready
for her to buy, she knows hardly anything. And the shop assistant from
whom she buys is no wiser. The people engaged in the making of them
know even less; for many of them are too poor to have much choice of
materials when they buy their own clothes.
Thus the capitalist system has produced an almost universal ignorance of
how things are made and done, whilst at the same time it has caused them
to be made and done on a gigantic scale. We have to buy books and
encyclopedias to find out what it is we are doing all day; and as the books
are written by people who are not doing it, and who get their information
from other books, what they tell us is from twenty to fifty years out of date,
and unpractical at that. And of course most of us are too tired of our work
when we come home to want to read about it: what we need is a cinema to
take our minds off it and feed our imagination.
It is a funny place, this world of Capitalism, with its astonishing spread of
ignorance and helplessness, boasting all the time of its spread of education
and enlightenment. There stand the thousands of property owners and the
millions of wage workers, none of them able to make anything, none of
them knowing what to do until somebody tells them, none of them having
the least notion of how it is that they find people paying them money, and
things in the shops to buy with it. And when they travel they are surprised
to find that savages and Esquimaux and villagers who have to make
everything for themselves are more intelligent and resourceful! The wonder
would be if they were anything else. We should die of idiocy through disuse
of our mental faculties if we did not fill our heads with romantic nonsense
out of illustrated newspapers and novels and plays and films. Such stuff
keeps us alive; but it falsifies everything for us so absurdly that it leaves us
more or less dangerous lunatics in the real world.
Excuse my going on like this; but as I am a writer of books and plays
myself, I know the folly and peril of it better than you do. And when I see

that this moment of our utmost ignorance and helplessness, delusion and
folly, has been stumbled on by the blind forces of Capitalism as the moment
for giving votes to everybody, so that the few wise women are hopelessly
overruled by the thousands whose political minds, as far as they can be said
to have any political minds at all, have been formed in the cinema, I realize
that I had better stop writing plays for a while to discuss political and social
realities in this book with those who are intelligent enough to listen to me.

43
DISABLEMENT ABOVE AND BELOW

Y
OU must not conclude from what I have just said that I grudge the
people their amusements. I have made most of my money by
amusing them. I recognize more clearly than most people that not
only does all work and no play make Jill a dull girl, but that she works so
that she may be able to enjoy life as well as to keep herself from dying of
hunger and exposure. She wants, and needs, leisure as well as wages. But
breadwinning must come before charabancs and cinemas. I have the
strongest sympathy, as I daresay you have, with the French gentleman who
said that if he could have the luxuries of life he could do without the
necessities; but unfortunately Nature does not share our sympathy, and
ruthlessly puts breadwinning first on pain of death. The French gentleman is
less important than the women who are asking for an eight-hour working
day, because, though what they are really asking for is for a few hours more
leisure when they have rested and slept, cooked and fed and washed up, yet
they know that leisure must be worked for, and that no woman can shirk her
share of the work except by putting it on some other woman and cutting
short her leisure.
Therefore when I say that Capitalism has reduced our people to a condition
of abject helplessness and ignorance in their productive capacity as
workers, you cannot reassure me by pointing out that factory girls are no
fools when it comes to gossiping and amusing themselves; that they are
resourceful enough to learn lip reading in the weaving-sheds, where the
banging of the looms makes it impossible to hear each other speak; that
their dances and charabanc excursions and whist drives and dressing and
wireless concerts stimulate and cultivate them to an extent unknown to their
grandmothers; that they consume frightful quantities of confectionery; and
that they limit their families to avoid too much mothering. But all this is
consumption, not production. When they are engaged in producing these
amusements: when they take the money for the tickets at the pay-boxes, or
do some scrap of the work of making a charabanc, or wind the wire on a

coil for broadcasting, they are mere machines, taking part in a routine
without knowing what came before or what is to follow.
In giving all the work to one class and all the leisure to another as far as the
law will let it, the Capitalist system disables the rich as completely as the
poor. By letting their land and hiring out their spare money (capital) to
others, they can have plenty of food and fun without lifting their little
fingers. Their agents collect the rent for the land, and lodge it in the bank
for them. The companies which have hired their spare money lodge the
half-yearly hire (dividends) in the same way. Bismarck said of them that
they had only to take a pair of scissors and cut off a coupon; but he was
wrong: the bank does even that for them; so that all they have to do is to
sign the cheques with which they pay for everything. They need do nothing
but amuse themselves; and they would get their incomes just the same if
they did not do even that. They can only plead that their ancestors worked
productively, as if everybody’s ancestors had not worked productively, or as
if this were any excuse for their not following their ancestors’ excellent
example. We cannot live on the virtues of our grandmothers. They may
have farmed their own land, and invented the ways in which their spare
money was applied to the land to make them richer; but when their
successors found that all this trouble would be taken for them by others,
they simply let the land and put out their spare money for hire (invested it).
Some of our great landholders inherit their land from feudal times, when
there were no factories nor railways, and when towns were so small that
they were walled in as gardens are now. In those days the landholders, with
the king at their head, had to raise armies and defend the country at their
own cost. They had to make the laws and administer them, doing military
work, police work, and government work of all sorts. Henry IV, who died of
overwork, found to his cost how true it was in those days that the greatest
among us must be servant to all the rest. Nowadays it is the other way
about: the greatest is she to whom all the rest are servants. All the chores
and duties of the feudal barons are done by paid officials. In country places
they may still sit on the Bench as unpaid magistrates; and there remains the
tradition that military service as officers is proper for their sons. A few of
them, with the help of solicitors and agents, manage the estates on which
they actually live, or allow their wives to do it. But these are only vestiges
of a bygone order, maintained mostly by rich purchasers of estates who are

willing to take a little trouble to be ranked as country gentlemen and county
ladies. There are always newly enriched folk who have this vanity for a
while, and will buy the estate of a real country gentleman to take on his
position in the country. But at any moment our landed gentry, whether they
are so by descent or purchase, can sell their country houses and parks, and
live anywhere they please in the civilized world without any public duties
or responsibilities. Sooner or later they all do so, thus breaking the only link
that binds them to the old feudal aristocracy save their names and titles. For
all the purposes of the real world of today there is no longer a feudal
aristocracy: it is merged in the industrial capitalist class, with which it
associates and intermarries without distinction, money making up for
everything. If it be still necessary to call the rich an ocracy of any kind, they
must be called a plutocracy, in which the oldest ducal estate and the newest
fortune made in business are only forms of capital, imposing no public
duties on the owner.
Now this state of things may seem extremely jolly for the plutocracy from
the point of view of those who are so overworked and underamused that
they can imagine nothing better than a life that is one long holiday; but it
has the disadvantage of making the plutocrats as helpless as babies when
they are left to earn their own living. You know that there is nothing more
pitiable on earth within the limits of good health than born ladies and
gentlemen suddenly losing their property. But have you considered that they
would be equally pitiable if their property were thrown on their own hands
to make what they could of it? They would not know how to farm their
lands or to work their mines and railways or to sail their ships. They would
perish surrounded by what Dr Johnson called “the potentiality of growing
rich beyond the dreams of avarice”. Without the hungry they would have to
say “I cannot dig: to beg (even if I knew how) I am ashamed”. The hungry
could do without them, and be very much the better for it; but they could
not do without the hungry.
Yet most of the hungry, left to themselves, would be quite as helpless as the
plutocrats. Take the case of a housemaid, familiar to the intelligent lady
who can afford to keep one. A woman may be a very good housemaid; but
you have to provide the house for her and manage the house before she can
set to work. Many excellent housemaids, when they marry, make a poor
enough job of their own housekeeping. Ask them to manage a big hotel,

which employs dozens of housemaids, and they will think you are laughing
at them: you might as well ask the porter at the Bank of England to manage
the bank. A bricklayer may be a very good bricklayer; but he cannot build a
house nor even make the bricks he lays. Any laborer can lay a plank across
a stream, or place a row of stepping-stones in it; but just ask him to build a
bridge, whether it be the simplest sort of canal bridge or a gigantic
construction like the Forth Bridge! You might as well ask your baby to
make its cot and knit its jumper, or your cook to design and construct a
kitchen range and water supply.
This helplessness gets more and more complete as civilization advances. In
villages you may still find carpenters and blacksmiths who can make things.
They can even choose and buy their materials, and then sell the finished
article. But in the cities on which our existence now depends you find
multitudes of workers and plutocrats who cannot make anything; do not
know how anything is made; and are so inept at buying and selling that
without fixed-price-shops they would perish.

44
THE MIDDLE STATION IN LIFE

A
ND now, if the landlords and capitalists can neither make anything
nor even tell others how to make it; and if the workers can do
nothing until they are told what to do, how does the world get on?
There must be some third class standing between the propertied class on the
one hand and the propertyless class on the other, to lease the land and hire
the capital and tell the workers what to do with them.
There is. You can see for yourself that there is a middle class which does all
the managing and directing and deciding work of the nation, besides
carrying on the learned and literary and artistic professions. Let us consider
how this class arose, and how it is continually recruited from the capitalist
families.
The capitalists do something more than merely own. They marry and have
children. Now an income which is comfortable for two people may not be
enough for three or four children in addition, to say nothing of possibly
twice or thrice that number. And when the three or four children grow up
and marry and have three or four children each, what meant riches for the
grandparents may mean poverty for the grandchildren.
To avoid this, propertied families may arrange that only the eldest son shall
inherit the property, leaving the younger sons to shift for themselves, and
the daughters to marry men of property if they can. This is called
primogeniture. Until 1926 it was the law of the land in England when the
owner of a landed estate died without leaving a will to the contrary. Where
there is no such law, and all the children inherit equal shares of the parents’
property, as they do among the peasant proprietors in France, the family
must come to an arrangement of the same kind between themselves, or else
sell the property and leave its owners with a few pounds each that will not
last them very long. Therefore they almost always do agree that the younger
children shall live by working like the hungry, whilst the eldest keeps the
farm and cultivates it. This cannot be done when the property is not land but
capital, and all the members of the family are living on the interest of hired

out spare money. Parents may make wills leaving all of it or most of it to
one son; but they do not do this as a rule; and sooner or later the property
gets divided and divided among children and other next-of-kin until the
inheritors cannot live on their shares.
But please remark that the younger sons who are thus thrown on the world
to earn their living have the tastes and habits and speech and appearance
and education of rich men. They are well connected, as we say. Their near
relations may be peers. Some of them have been schooled at Eton and
Harrow, and have taken degrees at Oxford and Cambridge. Others have less
distinguished connections. Their parents or grandparents may have made
money in business; and they may have gone to the big city schools, or to
day schools, instead of to Eton, and either to one of the new democratic
universities or to no university at all. Their most important relative may be a
mayor or alderman. But they are educated at secondary as distinguished
from elementary schools; and though not what they themselves call great
swells, they have the manners and appearance and speech and habits of the
capitalist class, are described as gentlemen, and politely addressed by letter
as Esquires instead of plain Misters.
All these propertyless people who have the ways and the culture of
propertied ones have to live by their wits. They go into the army and navy
as officers, or into the upper grades of the civil service. They become
clergymen, doctors, lawyers, authors, actors, painters, sculptors, architects,
schoolmasters, university professors, astronomers and the like, forming
what we call the professional class. They are treated with special respect
socially; but they see successful men of business, inferior to themselves in
knowledge, talent, character, and public spirit, making much larger
incomes. The highest sorts of mental work are often so unremunerative that
it is impossible to make a living by practising them commercially. Spinoza
lived by grinding lenses, and Rousseau by copying music. Einstein lives by
professorships. Newton lived, not by discovering gravitation and measuring
fluxions, but by acting as Master of the Mint, which other men could have
done as well. Even when a profession is comparatively lucrative and
popular, its gains are restricted by the fact that the work must all be done by
the practitioner’s own hand; for a surgeon cannot employ a thousand
subordinates to deal with a million patients as a soap king deals with a
million customers, nor the President of the Royal Academy hand over a two

thousand guinea portrait sitter to his secretary. The years of professional
success are usually preceded by a long struggle with scanty means. I myself
am held to be a conspicuous example of success in the most lucrative
branch of the literary profession; but until I was thirty I could not make
even a bare living by my pen. At thirty-eight I thought myself passing rich
on six or seven pounds a week; and even now, when I am seventy, and have
achieved all that can be achieved commercially at my job, I see in the paper
every day, under the heading Wills and Bequests, that the widow of some
successful man of business, wholly unknown to fame, has died leaving a
fortune which reduces my gains to insignificance.
The consequence is that professional men and civil servants, when they are
not incurable old-fashioned snobs who regard trade as beneath the dignity
of their family, and when their sons have no overwhelming aptitude for one
or other of the professions, advise them strongly to go in for business. The
man of business may not have much chance of a public statue unless he
pays for it and presents it to his native town with a spacious public park
attached; and his occupation may be a dry one in itself, however exciting
the prospect of pocketing more and more money may make it. But he can
make profits not only out of his work, like the surgeon or painter, but out of
the work of thousands of others as well. And his work is not necessarily
dry: modern businesses tend to become more interesting and important, and
even more scientific, than average professional work. Their activities are
much more varied: in fact modern commercial magnates, when they control
a dozen different businesses, become better informed and better developed
mentally than the rank and file of the professions. What is more, they are
learning to snap up the ablest university scholars and civil servants, and
take them into partnership not as office managers but as thinkers,
diplomatists, and commercial scientists. It is in industrially undeveloped
countries that professional men rank as an aristocracy of learning and
intellect: in European centres today commercial society is a more effective
reserve of culture than professional society. When the professional man or
the public servant tells his son that a berth in the civil service is a blind
alley, or doctoring at the call of the night bell a dog’s life, contrasting them
with the unlimited prospects and the infinite scope for personal initiative in
business, he is recommending the young man to improve on his father’s
condition instead of starting him on the downward path socially.

And what is business in the lump? It is hiring land from landlords and spare
money from capitalists, and employing the hungry to make enough money
out of them day by day to pay the wages for their keep and bring in a profit
as well. Astonishing fortunes can be made in this way by men and women
with the necessary ability and decision who have the particular sort of
pecuniary keenness and pertinacity that business requires. Even more
staggering profits are made sometimes by accident, the business man hitting
by chance on something new that the public happens to fancy. Millions are
made by medicines which injure people’s health instead of improving it
(read Tono-Bungay), and hair restorers that leave the buyer as bald as
before. Articles that nobody needs, and sham pleasures that give only
fatigue and boredom at extravagant prices, are advertized and advertized
until people are beglamored into thinking they cannot do without them.
But the main scope in business is for honorable and useful activity, from
growing food and building houses and making clothes, or manufacturing
spades and sewing-machines, to laying cables round the world, and building
giant ships to turn the ocean or the air into a highway. The planning and
management and ordering of this gives employment to able and energetic
men who have no property, but have the education and social address of the
propertied class. The educated who are neither able nor energetic, and who
have no professions, find employment as agents or clerks carrying out the
routine and keeping the accounts of businesses which the able ones have
established and are directing. And the women of their class are forced to
live by marrying them.
In this way we get, between the propertied class and the hungry mass, a
middle class which acts as a sort of Providence to both of them. It cultivates
the land and employs the capital of the property holders, paying them the
rent of their lands and the hire of their spare money without asking them to
lift a finger, and giving the hungry wages to live on without asking them to
think or decide or know or do anything except their own little bit of the job
in hand. The hungry have neither to buy the material nor to sell the product,
neither to organize the service nor find the customer. Like children they are
told what to do, and fed and lodged and clothed whilst they are doing it, not
always very handsomely perhaps; but at worst they are kept alive long
enough to produce a fresh set of hungry ones to replace them when they are
worn out.

There are always a few cases in which this management is done, not by
descendants of propertied folk, but by men and women sprung from the
hungriest of the hungry. These are the geniuses who know most of the
things that other people have to be taught, and who educate themselves as
far as they need any education. But there are so few of them that they need
not be taken into account. In great social questions we are dealing with the
abilities of ordinary citizens: that is, the abilities we can depend on
everyone except invalids and idiots possessing, and not with what one man
or woman in ten thousand can do. In spite of several cases in which persons
born in poverty and ignorance have risen to make vast fortunes, to become
famous as philosophers, discoverers, authors, and even rulers of kingdoms,
to say nothing of saints and martyrs, we may take it that business and the
professions are closed to those who cannot read and write, travel and keep
accounts, besides dressing, speaking, behaving, and handling and spending
money more or less in the manner of the propertied classes.
This is another way of saying that until about fifty years ago the great mass
of our people working for weekly wages were as completely shut out from
the professions and from business as if there had been a law forbidding
them on pain of death to attempt to enter them. I remember wondering
when I was a lad at a man who was in my father’s employment as a miller.
He could neither read nor write nor cipher (that is, do sums on paper); but
his natural faculty for calculation was so great that he could solve instantly
all the arithmetical problems that arose in the course of his work: for
instance, if it were a question of so many sacks of flour at so much a sack,
he could tell you the answer straight off without thinking, which was more
than my father or his clerks could do. But because he did not know his
alphabet, and could not put pen to paper, and had not the speech and
manners and habits and dress without which he would not have been
admitted into the company of merchants and manufacturers, or of lawyers,
doctors, and clergymen, he lived and died a poor employee, without the
slightest chance of rising into the middle class, or the faintest pretension to
social equality with my father. And my father, though he was propertyless,
and worked as a middle class civil servant and subsequently as a merchant,
was not at all proud of being a member of the middle class: on the contrary,
he resented that description, holding on to his connexion with the propertied
class as a younger son of many former younger sons, and therefore, though

unfortunately reduced to living not very successfully by his wits, a man of
family and a gentleman.
But this was sixty years ago. Since then we have established Communism
in education. If my father’s miller were a boy now, he would go to school
for nine years, whether his parents liked it or not, at the expense of the
whole community; and his mathematical gift would enable him to win a
scholarship that would take him on to a secondary school, and another
scholarship there that would take him to the university and qualify him for a
profession. At the very least he would become an accountant, even were it
only as a bookkeeper or clerk. In any case he would be qualified for middle
class employment and pass into that class.
Now the social significance of this is that the middle class, which the
younger sons and their descendants formerly had all to themselves as far as
the most desirable positions in it were concerned, is now recruited from the
working class as well. These recruits, with no gentlemanly nonsense about
them, are not only better taught than the boys who go to cheapish middle
class schools, but better trained to face the realities of life. Also the old
differences in speech and dress and manners are much less than they were,
partly because the working class is picking up middle class manners, but
much more because they are forcing their own manners and speech on the
middle class as standards. A man like my father, half a merchant, but
ashamed of it and unable to make up his mind to it, and half a gentleman
without any property to uphold his pretension, would, if he were a boy
nowadays, be beaten hollow in the competition for land, for capital, and for
position in the civil service by the sons of men whose grandfathers would
never have dreamed of presuming to sit down in his presence. The futile
propertyless gentlemen, the unserviceable and grossly insolent civil
servants whom Dickens described, have to be content nowadays with the
refuse of middle class employment. They are discontented, unhappy,
impecunious, struggling with a false position, borrowing (really begging)
from their relatives, and unable to realize, or unwilling to admit, that they
have fallen out of the propertied class, not into an intermediate position
where they have a monopoly of all the occupations and employments that
require a little education and manners, but right down into the ranks of the
hungry, without the hardening that makes the hungry life bearable.