Riches and Poverty (1910)

With our knowledge of the conditions of the present, these facts are only relatively satisfactory, and serve but to fill us with horror of the past. We see that more bread is consumed to-day than in 1867, but remember that 40 persons perish from exposure and starvation in the streets of London year by year.[62] We see that the death-rate has declined from 20.8 per 1,000 to 15.2 per 1,000 between 1867 and 1908, but remember that in the latter year as many as 113,000 children perished in England and Wales under the age of twelve months. We see that the average wage has risen, but also that it now amounts to but £46, 15s. per annum on a liberal estimate. We see that prices have fallen, but remember that, in 1908, one-third of our population, in spite of lower prices, have not sufficient means to command a proper supply of the common necessaries of existence, no matter how severe their thrift.

Writing in 1868, in the paper already referred to, Baxter wrote, in dealing with the question of real earnings as distinguished from nominal rates of wages, a passage which strikingly illustrates the conditions of labour in his day:[63]

These words were written over forty years ago, but it would need little emendation to give them application to-day. The growing strenuousness of modern industry makes it more and not less difficult for the ageing to earn a living. The increased use of machinery and the greater division of labour have made experience of less value than of yore. The ageing man resorts to hair dye to conceal the honourable age which is to rob him of his livelihood. Baxter's remarks about the building trades are absolutely true of to-day, but they now apply not to 400,000 men, but to 1,000,000. "All masters, when work grows slack, immediately discharge the inferior hands.... In bad times there are always a large number out of employment." The position of agricultural labourers has improved, but chiefly because their rapidly decreasing numbers have placed a premium upon their services. Even so, in parts of the country removed from coal-mines, the most pitiable conditions prevail. Kettle broth is still part of the menu of the Wiltshire labourer.

In the East End of London the economic position of the dock and riverside labourers is much the same as Baxter described it, while in the furniture trade the "garret masters" are still with us. True—most honourably true—it is also that still the workers endure great hardships before they will apply to the Guardians. "They exhaust their savings, they try to the utmost their trade unions or benefit societies; they pawn little by little all their furniture; and at last they are driven to ask for relief."

The Board of Trade, after a careful examination of the question of unemployment in 1904, arrived at the general conclusion that "The average level of employment during the past four years has been almost exactly the same as the average of the preceding forty years" (Cd. 2,337). The conditions of employment, the want of security of tenure, are very much what they were in 1867.

As for pauperism, it is difficult to congratulate ourselves upon improvement since 1867 when we remember that in England and Wales alone 1,500,000 to 2,000,000 persons are in receipt of relief in the course of a single year. This statement rests upon ascertained facts, as will be found by reference to the statistics given in our examination of the question of Old Age Pensions. The population of England and Wales being about 36,000,000 (1910) this means that one person in every twenty has recourse to the Poor Law Guardians during a single year.

If our national income had but increased at the same rate as our population since 1867 it would, in 1908, have amounted to but about £1,200,000,000. As we have seen, it is now about £1,840,000,000. Yet the Error of Distribution remains so great that while the total population in 1867 amounted to 30,000,000, we have to-day a nation of 30,000,000 poor people in our rich country, and many millions of these are living under conditions of degrading poverty. Of those above the line of primary poverty, millions are tied down by the conditions of their labour to live in surroundings which preclude the proper enjoyment of life or the rearing of healthy children. The comparatively high wages of London are accompanied by rents high in proportion and frequently by waste of income and time upon travelling expenses. In so far as the manual labourers have been reduced in proportion to population it has been to swell the ranks of black-coated working men, clerks, agents, travellers, canvassers, and others, whose tenure of employment is precarious, whose earnings are very low, and whose labour as we have already noted is largely waste.

We have won through the horrors of the birth and establishment of the factory system at the cost of physical deterioration. We have purchased a great commerce at the price of crowding our population into the cities and of robbing millions of strength and beauty. We have given our people what we grimly call elementary education and robbed them of the elements of a natural life. All this has been done that a few of us may enjoy a superfluity of goods and services. Out of the travail of millions we have added to a landed gentry an aristocracy of wealth. These, striding over the bodies of the fallen, proclaim in accents of conviction the prosperity of their country.

There leaps to the mind the mordant lines in which Ruskin, thirty years ago, wrote a "modern version" of the Beatitudes[65]:—

There is no whit of exaggeration in these lines. The passage of thirty years has but added to their sting. Thirty years of accumulation of the results of toil in hands other than those of the toilers have had for consummation the accusing series of facts which are examined in the early chapters of this book. Deprivation for the many and luxury for the few have degraded our national life at both ends of the scale. At the one end, "thirteen millions on the verge of hunger," physically and morally deteriorated through poverty and unloveliness. At the other, the inheritors of the earth, "senseless conduits through which the strength and riches of their native land are poured into the cup of the fornication of its capital."

Blessed indeed are the Rich, for theirs is the governance of the realm, theirs is the Kingdom. Theirs is a power above the throne, for it has been a maxim of British politics that our government should be a poor government, and a poor government cannot contend in the direction of affairs with the imperium of wealth. This may be illustrated by our attempts to "educate" the mass of the people. For a few brief years the government, with small funds raised with timorous hands, does a little to form the mind and character of the child. Even in these early years it consents that the future proud citizen of Empire shall be improperly fed and badly housed. These early moments passed, the mockery of "education" ceases, and the child, taught by the State to read, to write, and to cipher, becomes a unit of industry. At this point begins the serious training of the citizen. Forthwith he is inducted into some more or less worthy employment, that employment, as we have seen, resulting from the great expenditure of the few and the poor expenditure of the many. Careers are thus chiefly shaped by the wealthy, for theirs is the greatest call. The demand for luxuries is too great; the demand for necessaries is too small; the unit of industry is fortunate, therefore, if he is inducted into useful service. The State washes its hands of his development. The educational sham over, the real education of life begins. So far as the State calls for privates of industry it is chiefly to make them soldiers, sailors, makers of guns, builders of battleships. The development of all things useful, of railways, of canals, of roads, of cities, of houses, is resigned to the blind call for commodities and the intelligence of individuals who, in search of private gain, seek, without regard to the national well-being, to profit by that blind call.

Yet the manner in which its people are employed matters everything to a nation. It is not sufficient to give the child a smattering of knowledge. We need to take a collective interest in the general education of our citizens, and that education is the result of expenditure. The consumer gives the order. Given a fairly equable distribution of income, the call will be as to the greater part for worthy things, as to the smaller part for luxuries. Given a grossly unequal distribution, and the call for luxuries will be so great as to divert a considerable part of the national labour into channels of waste and degradation.

To keep a government poor is to keep it weak. The poor government may resolve to educate, but it will have no means to carry out its resolve; its teachers will be underpaid; its schools inefficient. The poor government may pass Housing Acts; it will but call for better houses that will not come when it does call for them. The poor government may piously resolve to create small holdings; there will be no means to carry out the pious resolve. The poor government may, at periodic intervals, look the question of Unemployment in the face; its legislation will but reflect its poverty, and be in its provisions an acknowledgment that the power to employ, the power to govern, is in other hands.

Even those who have striven to hold fast the curious faith that civilization comes, not through collective service, but through individual strife, are constrained to admit that much waste is going on. It is noteworthy that Sir Robert Giffen, in one of his last essays on Taxation, said:[66]

"When the proportion (of income appropriated by the state) becomes one-tenth or less it is doubtful whether the state can do best for its subjects by making the proportion still lower, that is, by abandoning one tax after another, or whether equal or greater advantage would not be gained by using the revenue for wise purposes under the direction of the state, such as great works of sanitation, or water supply or public defence. In other words, when taxes are very moderate and the revenue appropriated by the state is a small part only of the aggregate of individual incomes, it seems possible that individuals in a rich country may waste individually resources which the state could apply to very profitable purposes. The state, for instance, could perhaps more usefully engage in some great works, such as establishing reservoirs of water for the use of town populations on a systematic plan, or making a tunnel under one of the channels between Ireland and Great Britain, or a sea-canal across Scotland between the Clyde and the Forth, or purchasing land from Irish landlords and transferring it to tenants, than allow money to fructify or not fructify, as the case may be, in the pockets of individuals. Probably there are no works more beneficial to a community in the long run than those like a tunnel between Ireland and Great Britain, which open an entirely new means of communication of strategical as well as commercial value, but are not likely to pay the individual entrepreneur within a short period of time."

Here we have a reflection of the uneasy feeling that all is not well in the disposition of the income of the community. Very true it is that "individuals in a rich country may waste individually resources which the State could apply to very profitable purposes." Even were the means by which "Captain Roland fills his purse" moral, we should need to look to Captain Roland's expenditure. The effects of the robbery do not end with the impoverishment of the despoiled. The despoiler proceeds to spend the contents of his fat purse, and in spending he buys bodies and souls, and builds up vested interests in degrading occupations.

In the foregoing pages I have pointed both to mere palliatives of existing evils and to real remedies which go to the root of things. Our attempts to reform, our strivings towards organization, must in practice have regard both to palliatives and to remedies. We have to keep in mind both the impoverished and sometimes degraded creatures which are effects of past and existing causes, while dealing drastically and radically with the causes themselves. At present the greater part of the labours of social reformers are directed to dealing with a succession of distressful effects. Here are slums; how shall we rehouse their inmates? Here are paupers; what shall we do with them? Here are unemployed; how shall we keep them going until they find employers? Here are aged poor; can we, should we, give them pensions? We owe a present duty in all these and many other matters. The effects must be dealt with and ameliorated. It is beyond question that there is a clear call to succour the aged, to care for the weak, to aid poor women in their time of trouble. The sufferer, the affected individual, the disease, must be dealt with. But ever we must keep before us the causes which bring into being the raw material of our social problems; ever we must have clear vision of the crime of poverty in a wealthy country; ever we must seek to come to grips with the original sin.

To deal with causes we must strike at the Error of Distribution by gradually substituting public ownership for private ownership of the means of production. In no other way can we secure for each worker in the hive the full reward of his labour. So long as between the worker and his just wage stands the private landlord and the private capitalist, so long will poverty remain, and not poverty alone, but the moral degradations which inevitably arise from the devotion of labour to the service of waste. So long as the masses of the people are denied the fruit of their own labour, so long will our civilization be a false veneer, and our every noble thoroughfare be flanked by purlieus of shame.

There is already a beginning made. A few hundred millions have been applied as public capital in the ownership by many municipalities of such services as tramways, gasworks, and waterworks. As we saw in our examination of the national wealth, such capital is yet but a tiny fraction of the whole, and it still bears a great mortgage and pays interest to private hands. That interest, in process of time, will disappear through the operation of sinking funds, and then, as to certain services, the community will enter into its own with no tribute to pay to private usurers. From the small beginnings made we must seek to advance, nor need we be deterred by those who implore us to hasten slowly. If Rome was not built in a day, Washington was built in not many days, and the factory system itself is little more than a century old. The lapse of a single generation might see well advanced the building of our new city.

It would be a great pity if anyone were to imagine that the changes necessary to secure the just reward of all forms of labour are either difficult to effect or likely to cause dislocation in the making. As has been pointed out, the greater number of our industrial concerns are already shaped in the form of limited liability companies, the shareholders in which are dumb, while the management is in the hands of paid officials. In 1902-3, while private firms were assessed to Income Tax on £193,000,000, public companies were assessed on £239,000,000. In 1907-8 the respective figures were £183,000,000 and £259,000,000. The re-shaping proceeds apace. The reform which needs to be effected is to substitute the community at large for the dumb shareholders. Management, ability, invention, would be properly rewarded, as they are now rewarded in some cases, and as they are not now rewarded in many cases. The only change would be the gradual substitution of the community for the shareholders, and the consequent disappearance of unearned incomes. Such portions of the product as were necessary for application as new capital would be so applied by the community. For the rest, the whole of the product would go to labour. Saving, the necessary saving, without which labour would go without tools, would be simply and automatically effected, and capital would take its true and rightful place as the handmaiden of labour.

Let us not go further without a vision and a hope. That vision, that hope, is not of a regimented society, but of a community relieved from nine-tenths of its present irksome routine and carking care. If the individual is to be set free it can only be in a society so organized as to reduce the labour employed in the production of common necessaries to a minimum. That minimum cannot be secured without the organization of each of the great branches of production and distribution. Common needs can be satisfied with little labour if labour be properly applied. The work of a few will feed a hundred or supply exquisite cloth for the clothing of fifty. The work for a few hours per day of every adult member of the community will be ample to supply every comfort in each season to all. Thus set free, the lives of men will turn to the uplifting, individual work which is the pride of the craftsman. The dwellings of men will contain not only the socialized products within common reach, but the proud individual achievements of their inmates. The simple and beautiful clothing of the community will chiefly be made of fabrics woven in the socialized factories, but it will often be worked by the loving hands of women. A happy union of labour economized in routine work and labour lavished upon individual work will uplift the crafts of the future and the character of those who follow them. The abominations of machine-made ornament will disappear, and art be wedded to everyday life. Each new invention to save labour in mining, or tilling, or building, or spinning, will be hailed with joy as a release from toil and a gift of more time in which to do individual work. The inventor, the originator, now unhappily compelled to hunt for a capitalist and bow low his genius before some individual distinguished only for that gift of acquisitiveness, that business ability, which is the lowest attribute of mankind, will see his idea put to the test and reap not unholy gains, but the honour of his fellows if it is not found wanting. The painter, no longer compelled to paint the portraits of the rich and not necessarily beautiful, will ally his gifts with the common life of men and be carried in triumph before the enduring monuments of his genius. The organizer, the man of arrangement, will be invited to exercise his talent, not in over-reaching and despoiling his fellows, but in planning their welfare in a thousand new schemes of development. No host of wasteful workers will be found in the industrial camp. Accounts will be simple and clerks few. No travellers, agents or touts will be needed to push doubtful commodities. The sham and the substitute will be found only in museums. It will be obviously ridiculous to employ any but good materials, for labour can only be economized by producing the things which are the best of their kind. Policies of insurance, those typical documents of a community of prey, will be read in the public archives with much the same feelings as we now read a warrant for the burning of a Bruno. The young men who now waste their time in ruling up books in banks and insurance offices or in serving writs will find manly and useful work. The production of commodities will be commensurate with the labour put forth, unemployment will be one of the few crimes known to the statute-book, and last, but not least, the economic dependence of woman will cease.

The attainment of such ends will only be difficult as long as we refuse to apply scientific methods to the ordering of common affairs. It is in the domain of politics alone that men refuse to apply first principles to the solution of problems. The mental daring which has accomplished so much in engineering, in astronomy, in surgery, in every department of science, is replaced in the sphere of politics by a timorous tinkering with admitted evils. With things the scientist has worked marvels in a single century. With those marvels the politician has done little. The scientist has applied his skill to locomotion; the politician has refused to avail himself of that skill in order to distribute the population healthily. The scientist has stated the conditions of health; the politician has refused to create those conditions. The scientist has supplied the tools; the politician has neglected to take them up.

The problem of riches and poverty is of the simplest. It presents none of the difficulties which attach to the measurement of the mass of the sun, or the treatment of such a disease as cancer. Science has presented us with such instruments that we can easily create a tremendous superfluity of commodities if we choose to do so. We know how to produce; we know how to transport the results of our production. The appliances at our command, wielded by the labour of 44,000,000 people, could furnish many more foot-tons of work than are needed to give proper housing, suitable clothing and good food to every unit of the community. There is here no impenetrable secret; we have read enough in the book of Nature to control her forces to effect; our power of production is not too small, but already greater than our need. As I have pointed out in an earlier page, if invention went no further if science now came to a standstill, we should have tools more than adequate to abolish poverty.

Unfortunately the politicians and the economists have never discussed the question of poverty from this point of view. They have found men buying and selling, and as buyers and sellers hunting for profits they have discussed them. Volumes have been written on such subjects as "rent," "interest," or "value," but nothing has been done to inquire how much work is needed to feed, clothe and house a community, and how best that work may be accomplished. In designing an engine, the man of science considers the work to be done and the known means to do it. Is it too much to ask that in ordering the affairs of a nation, statesmen should consider the quantity of commodities needed to give material happiness and the known means to produce and distribute them? To make the best use of our energies, to profit fully by the discoveries and inventions of the living and the dead, we must come to a common agreement as to the work which needs to be done and determine that that work shall be accomplished. For want of that agreement and determination, for want, that is, of a wise collectivism, the greater number of our people are poor.

It is probable that the earliest readers of this book will be of those who, like myself, are amongst the favoured few whose work brings them pleasure and the means of happiness. To these the first appeal. Is it a good thing, is it an honourable thing, to be one of the few whose bark is borne upon the waters of wretchedness, whose fortunes float upon a sea of unfathomable depths of despair? Look downwards and you shall see monsters that once were human, frailties that once were women, devils that once were children. These are the product of the individual strife in which it is not always the noblest thing to succeed, but in which it is ever a terrible thing to fail. Is success worth having which is purchased at such a price?

The last appeal shall be to the poor. It is no escape from labour which the thinking man offers the people. There are no honourable avenues to ease and luxury in the organization which would abolish poverty. It is a world of service which a civilization would substitute for a world of serfdom and pain. But if, realizing that the world has no room for the idle, the people would rise to a freedom only bounded by the knowledge of, and necessity for, collective decision, then there is the broadest avenue for hope and the clearest call to action. The achievements of those who are gone, these are the inheritance of the people. The only true riches of the nation, men and women, these are the people themselves. The people have but to will it, and we set our faces towards a civilization.

INDEX