THE INTELLIGENT WOMAN’S GUIDE TO
SOCIALISM AND CAPITALISM
1
A CLOSED QUESTION OPENS
IT 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 Old laws are repealed to allow people to do what they used to be punished for doing (marrying their deceased wives’ sisters and husbands’ brothers, for example). Laws that are not repealed are amended and amended and amended like a child’s knickers until there is hardly a shred of the first stuff left.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.