33
CAPITAL
NOW 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.