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HOW MUCH FOR EACH?
YOU 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 That law can be repealed or altered by parliament if the people desire it and vote accordingly.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.