37
SENDING CAPITAL OUT OF THE COUNTRY
SO 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.