50
DIVIDE AND GOVERN
THE weakness of Trade Unionism was that the concessions wrung from the employers when trade was good were taken back again when trade was bad, because, as the employers commanded the main national store of spare money, they could always stop working without starving for longer than their employees. The Trade Unions soon had to face the fact that unless they could get the concessions fixed and enforced by law, they were certain to lose by the lock-outs all they gained by the strikes. At the same time they saw that Parliament had put a permanent stop to the sweating of very young children in factories; and though, as I have explained, their members had been driven by poverty to object to this reform, nevertheless it convinced them that Parliament, if it liked, could fix any reform so firmly that the employers could not go back on it. They wanted a permanent reduction in the then monstrous length of the factory working day. The cry for a reduction to eight hours was set up. At first it seemed an unattainable ideal; and it is still very far from being completely attained. But a ten hours day for women and children and young persons seemed reasonable and possible. As to the men, they were told they were grown-up independent Britons, and that it would be an outrage on British liberty to prevent an Englishman from working as long as he liked. But when the women and young children go home the factory engine is stopped, because its work cannot go on without them. When the engine stops the men may as well go home too, as their work cannot go on without the engine. So the men got the factory hours shortened by law “behind the petticoats of the women”.
And how did the employees, who had no votes at that time, induce Parliament, in which there were only landlords, capitalists, and employers, to pass these benevolent Acts of Parliament for the protection of the employees against the employers?
If I were to reply that they were acts of pure conscience, nobody nowadays would believe me, because Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self-interest backed by force. But even Capitalist cynicism will admit that however unconscionable we may be when our own interests are affected, we can be most indignantly virtuous at the expense of others. The Intelligent Woman must guard herself against imagining that the property owners and employers in Parliament a hundred years ago had read this book, and therefore understood that their interests were the same, though their occupations and habits and social positions were so very different. The country gentlemen despised the employers as vulgar tradesmen, and made them feel it. The employers, knowing that any fool might be a peer or a country gentleman if he had the luck to be born in a country house, whilst success in business needed business ability, were determined to destroy the privileges of the landed aristocracy. This had been done in France in 1789 by a revolution; and it was by threatening a similar revolution that the English employers, in 1832, forced the King and the peerage, after a long popular agitation, to pass into law the famous Reform Bill which practically transferred the command of Parliament in England from the hereditary landed aristocracy to the industrial employers.
You know what a popular agitation means. It means a little reasoning and a great deal of abuse of the other side. Before 1832 the employers did not confine themselves to pointing out the absurdity of allowing a couple of cottages owned by a county aristocrat to send a member to Parliament when the city of Birmingham was not represented there. Most people thought it quite natural that great folk should have great privileges, and cared nothing about Birmingham, which they had heard of only as a dirty place where most of the bad pennies (Brummagem buttons) came from. The employers therefore stirred up public feeling against the landed gentry by exposing all their misdeeds: their driving of whole populations out of the country to make room for sheep or deer; their ruthless enforcement of the Game Laws, under which men were transported with the worst felons for poaching a few hares or pheasants; the horrible condition of the laborers’ cottages on their estates; the miserable wages they paid: their bigoted persecution of Nonconformists not only by refusing to allow any places of worship except those of the Church of England to be built on their estates, but by nominating to the Church livings such clergymen as could be depended on to teach the children in the village schools that all Dissenters were disgraced in this world and damned in the next; their equally bigoted boycotting of any shopkeeper who dared to vote against their candidates at elections; with all the other tyrannies which in those days made it a common saying, even among men of business, that “the displeasure of a lord is a sentence of death”. By harping on these grievances the employers at last embittered public opinion against the squires to such a pitch that the fear of a repetition in England of the French Revolution broke down the opposition to the Reform Bill. The employers, after propitiating King William IV by paying his debts, were able to force Parliament to pass the Bill; and that event inaugurated the purseproud reign of the English middle class under Queen Victoria.
Naturally the squires were not disposed to take this defeat lying down. They revenged themselves by taking up Lord Shaftesbury’s agitation for the Factory Acts, and shewing that the employer’s little finger was thicker than the country gentleman’s loins; that the condition of the factory employees was worse than that of the slaves on the American and West Indian plantations; that the worst cottages of the worst landlords had at least fresher air than the overcrowded slums of the manufacturing towns; that if the employers did not care whether their “hands” were Church of England or Methodist, neither did they care whether they were Methodists or Atheists, because they had no God but Mammon; that if they did not persecute politically it was only because the hands had no votes; that they persecuted industrially as hard as they could by imprisoning Trade Unionists; and that the personal and often kindly relations between the peasantry and the landlords, the training in good manners and decent housekeeping traditions learnt by the women in domestic service in the country houses, the kindnesses shewn to the old and sick on the great estates, were all lost in the squalor and misery, the brutality and blasphemy, the incestuous overcrowding, and the terrible dirt epidemics in the mining and factory populations where English life was what the employer’s greed had made it.
All this, though quite true, was merely the pot again calling the kettle black; for the country gentlemen did not refuse the dividends made for them by the employers in the mines and factories, nor refuse to let factories and slums be built all over their estates in Lancashire; nor did the employers, when they had made fortunes, hesitate to buy country estates and “found families” to be brought up in the strictest county traditions, nor to disparage trade as vulgar when the generation that remembered what their grandfathers were had died out. But the quarrel between them explains how it was that when Parliament consisted exclusively of landlords and capitalist employers or their nominees, and the proletariat had no votes, yet the Factory Acts got passed. The Acts were the revenge of the squires for the Reform Act.
Also, the poor were not wholly voteless. The owner of a freehold worth forty shillings a year had a vote; and a number of odd old franchises existed which gave quite poor people a certain weight at elections. They could not return a Labor member (such a thing was then unheard of); but they could sometimes turn the scale as between the Conservative landlord and the Liberal employer. If the Conservatives and Liberals had understood that their political interests were the same, and that they must present a united front to Labor, the employees would have had no hope except in revolution. But the Conservatives and Liberals did not understand their commercial interests. The Conservative clung blindly to his old privileges: the Liberal followed the slot of his new profits as thoughtlessly as a hound follows the slot of a fox. Both of them wanted to be in Parliament because it gave them personal importance, opening the way to the front bench, where the Cabinet Ministers sit, and to knighthoods, baronetcies, and peerages. The Liberals considered themselves the party of reform because they had carried the Reform Bill, and, as the employees wanted all sorts of reform very badly, took it for granted that they would always vote gratefully for the Liberals.
Under this delusion a Liberal Government made a bid for popular support by offering votes to the working class. The Conservatives at first opposed this so fiercely that they turned the Liberals out at the next election; but a very clever Conservative leader named Benjamin Disraeli, afterwards Earl of Beaconsfield, a Jew who had begun his political career, like Karl Marx, as a champion of the proletariat, persuaded the Conservatives that they were really more popular in the country than the Liberals, and induced them to make the very extension of the franchise they had just been opposing. Naturally the employees, when they got some votes in this way, used them to get more votes; and the end of it was that everybody got a vote, including at long last the women, though the women had to make a special and furious fight for their inclusion, and did not win it until the national work they did when they took the place of the absent men during the war of 1914-18 shamed the country into enfranchising them.
The proletarian voters who could formerly only turn the scale between Conservative and Liberal can now turn out both Conservative and Liberal, and elect candidates of their own. They did not at first realize this, and have not fully realized it yet. They began by timidly sending into Parliament about a dozen men who were not called Labor members, but working class members of the Liberal Party. It became the custom for Liberal Governments to give a minor ministerial post to some mild middle class professor who was vaguely supposed to be interested in factory legislation and popular education, and who was openly treated as a negligible nobody by the rest of the Cabinet.
Meanwhile Socialist societies were growing up among students of Karl Marx’s famous exposure of the sins of Capitalism, and of a very widely circulated book called Progress and Poverty, written by an American named Henry George, who had seen within his own lifetime American villages, where people were neither poor enough to be degraded and miserable nor rich enough to be idle and extravagant, changed by the simple operation of private property in land and capital into cities of fabulous wealth, so badly divided that the mass of the people were weltering in shocking poverty whilst a handful of owners wallowed in millions. These Societies broke the tradition of proletarian attachment to the Liberal Party by making the workers what Marx called class-conscious, a phrase which the Intelligent Woman has probably met several times in the papers without knowing any more clearly than the newspaper writers exactly what it means. The voters who had believed that there were only two parties in politics, the Conservatives and the Liberals (or Tories and Whigs), representing the two great religious parties of the Churchmen and the Dissenters, and the two great economic interests of the country farmers with their landlords and the town men of business with their capitalists, were now taught that from the point of view of the employee there is not a penny to choose between Conservatives and Liberals, as the gain of either means the employee’s loss, and that the only two parties who really have opposed interests are the party of the propertied class on the one hand and the party of the propertyless proletariat on the other: in other words, the party of Capital and the party of Labor. What mattered was not the Parliamentary struggle between the Liberal Mr Gladstone and the Conservative Mr Disraeli as to which should be Prime Minister, or between their successors Mr Balfour, Mr Bonar Law, and Mr Baldwin of the one party, and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, Mr Asquith, and Mr Lloyd George of the other. To the class-conscious proletarian all that is mere Tweedledum and Tweedledee: what is really moving the world is the Class Struggle, the Class War (both terms are in use) between the proprietors and the proletariat for the possession of the land and capital of the country (the Means of Production). When a man realized that, he was said to be class-conscious. These terms are misleading because they imply that all the proletarians are in one camp and all the bourgeoisie in the other, which is untrue; but as the Intelligent Woman who has read thus far now knows what they mean, let them pass for the moment.
The Socialist Societies had begun badly by treating Parliament as the enemy’s camp; boycotting the Churches as mere contrivances for doping the workers into submission to Capitalism; and denouncing Trade Unionism and Co-operation as mistaken remedies. Under Marx and Engels, Morris and Hyndman, Socialism was a middle class movement caused by the revolt of the consciences of educated and humane men and women against the injustice and cruelty of Capitalism, and also (this was a very important factor with Morris) against its brutal disregard of beauty and the daily human happiness of doing fine work for its own sake. Now the strongest and noblest feelings of this kind were quite compatible with the most complete detachment from and ignorance of proletarian life and history in the class that worked for weekly wages. The most devoted middle class champions of the wage workers knew what housemaids and gardeners and railway porters and errand boys and postmen were like; but factory hands, miners, and dockers might as well have been fairies for all their lady and gentleman sympathizers knew about them.
Whenever your sympathies are strongly stirred on behalf of some cruelly ill used person or persons of whom you know nothing except that they are ill used, your generous indignation attributes all sorts of virtues to them, and all sorts of vices to those who oppress them. But the blunt truth is that ill used people are worse than well used people: indeed this is at bottom the only good reason why we should not allow anyone to be ill used. If I thought you would be made a better woman by ill treatment I should do my best to have you ill treated. We should refuse to tolerate poverty as a social institution not because the poor are the salt of the earth, but because “the poor in a lump are bad”. And the poor know this better than anyone else. When the Socialist movement in London took its tone from lovers of art and literature who had read George Borrow until they had come to regard tramps as saints, and passionate High Church clergymen (Anglo-Catholics) who adored supertramps like St Francis, it was apt to assume that all that was needed was to teach Socialism to the masses (vaguely imagined as a huge crowd of tramplike saints) and leave the rest to the natural effect of sowing the good seed in kindly virgin soil. But the proletarian soil was neither virgin nor exceptionally kindly. The masses are not in the least like tramps; and they have no romantic illusions about oneanother, whatever illusions each of them may cherish about herself. When John Stuart Mill was a Parliamentary candidate in Westminster, his opponents tried to defeat him by recalling an occasion on which he had said flatly that the British workman was neither entirely truthful, entirely sober, entirely honest, nor imbued with a proper sense of the wickedness of gambling: in short, that he was by no means the paragon he was always assumed to be by parliamentary candidates when they addressed his class as “Gentlemen”, and begged for his vote. Mill probably owed his success on that occasion to the fact that instead of denying his opinion he uncompromisingly reaffirmed it. The wage workers are as fond of flattery as other people, and will swallow any quantity of it from candidates provided it be thoroughly understood that it is only flattery, and that the candidates know better; but they have no use for gushingly idealistic ladies and gentlemen who are fools enough to think that the poor are cruelly misunderstood angels.
In the eighteen-eighties the Socialists found out their mistake. The Fabian Society got rid of its Anarchists and Borrovians, and presented Socialism in the form of a series of parliamentary measures, thus making it possible for an ordinary respectable religious citizen to profess Socialism and belong to a Socialist Society without any suspicion of lawlessness, exactly as he might profess himself a Conservative and belong to an ordinary constitutional club. A leader of the society, Mr Sidney Webb, married Miss Beatrice Potter, who had made a study at first hand of working-class life and organization, and had published a book on Co-operation. They wrote the first really scientific history of Trade Unionism, and thereby not only made the wage-workers conscious of the dignity of their own political history (a very important step in the Marxian class-consciousness) but shewed the middle-class Socialists what the public work of the wage-working world was really like, and convinced them of the absurdity of supposing that Socialists could loftily ignore the organization the people had already accomplished spontaneously in their own way. Only by grafting Socialism on this existing organization could it be made a really powerful proletarian movement.
The Liberals, still believing themselves to be the party of progress, assumed that all progressive movements would be grafted on the Liberal Party as a matter of course, to be patronized and adopted by the Liberal leaders in Parliament as far as they approved. They were disagreeably surprised when the first effect of the adoption of constitutional parliamentarism by the Fabian Society was an attack on the Liberal Government of that day, published in one of the leading reviews, for being more reactionary and hostile to the wage-workers than the Conservatives. The Liberals were so astonished and scandalized that they could only suggest that the Fabian Society had been bribed by the Conservatives to commit what seemed to all Liberals to be an act of barefaced political treachery. They soon had their eyes opened much more widely. The Fabian Society followed up its attack by a proposal for the establishment of a Labor Party in Parliament to oppose both Conservatives and Liberals impartially. A working-class leader, Keir Hardie, formerly a miner, founded a Society called the Independent Labor Party to put this proposal into practice. Among the members of the Fabian Society who became a leader in this new Society was Mr Ramsay MacDonald, who, by his education and knowledge of the world outside the wage-working class, was better qualified than Keir Hardie for successful leadership in Parliament. From the Independent Labor Party sprang The Labor Party, a political federation, much more powerful, of Trade Unions and of Socialist Societies, whose delegates sat on its executive committee. As all the persons who were members of Trade Unions at that time could, by subscribing a penny a week each, have provided a political fund of over £325,000 (there are three times as many now), this combination with the Trade Unionists was decisive. At the election of 1906 enough Labor members were elected to form an independent party in Parliament. By 1923 they had encroached so much that neither the Liberals nor the Conservatives had a majority in the House; and Mr Ramsay MacDonald was challenged to form a Government and shew whether Labor could govern or not. He accepted the challenge, and became British Prime Minister with a Cabinet of Socialists and Trade Unionists. It was a more competent government than the Conservative Government that preceded it, partly because its members, having risen from poverty or obscurity to eminence by their personal ability, were unhampered by nonentities, and partly because it knew what the world is like today, and was not dreaming, as even the cleverest of the Conservative leaders still were, of the Victorian mixture of growing cotton lordship and decaying feudal lordship in the capitalist class, with starved helpless ignorance and submissive servitude in the proletariat, which had not even lasted out Queen Victoria’s lifetime. In fact, the Labor leaders were to an extraordinary degree better educated and more experienced than their opponents, who infatuatedly took it for granted that rich men must be superior in education because they graduate in the two aristocratic universities instead of in the school of economically organic life.
The Liberals and Conservatives, disgusted with this result, and ruefully sorry that by derisively giving Labor a chance to prove its relative incompetence it had proved the opposite, combined to throw Mr MacDonald out of office in 1924. Although he had as yet no real chance of a majority in the country, he had so scared the plutocrats in Parliament by his comparative success as Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, which they had regarded as the department in which Labor was certain to break down ridiculously, that they overdid their attack by persuading the country that he was connected with the Communist Government of Russia. The panic which followed, lasting until the election was over, wiped out at the polls, not the Labor Party, which just managed to hold its own, but the innocent Liberal Party.
The danger of stampeding a general election is that all sorts of political lunatics, whom no one would dream of taking seriously in quiet times, get elected by screaming that the country is in danger, whilst sober candidates are defeated ignominiously. In 1906, when a general election was stampeded by an alarm of Chinese labor, third rate Liberal candidates ousted first rate Conservative ones by the score. In 1924 the Red Russian scare enabled third rate Conservatives to oust first rate Liberals. In both cases the result was a grave falling-off in the quality of the victorious party. When the Sirdar, our representative in Egypt, was unluckily assassinated just after the election, the Conservatives, drunk with their victory, could not be restrained by the Prime Minister, Mr Baldwin, from hurling at the assassins an insane threat to cut off the water supply of Egypt. This extravagance, which startled all Europe, was felt to be just the sort of thing that Mr MacDonald would not have done. The Government had to climb down rather abjectly when it discovered that it could neither carry out its threat nor expect anything but reprobation from all sides, both at home and abroad, for having been so absurd as to make it; for though a forceful wickedness is, I am sorry to say, rather popular than otherwise when our Governments indulge in it at the expense of foreigners, we expect it to be successful. A climb-down is unpopular in proportion to the arrogance of the climb-up. Consequently the Government lost on the Egyptian fiasco the support won by the Russian scare; but it lost its head again at a crazy threat of a general strike by the Trade Unions. The Russians sent us a very handsome subscription to the strike funds; and the Government, frightened and infuriated, and quite incapable of measuring the danger (which need not have alarmed a mouse) brought in a futile but provocative Bill to make Trade Unionism illegal, and broke off diplomatic relations with Russia after raiding the offices of the Russian Government in London. Meanwhile, Labor in Parliament, having recovered from the shock of the election, settled into its place as the official Opposition.
To sum up the story to the point it has now reached (1927), the Proletariat, having begun its defensive operations in the Class War by organizing its battalions into Trade Unions, only to discover that it could not retain its winnings without passing them into law, organized itself politically as a Labor Party, and returned enough members to Parliament to change the House of Commons from a chamber in which two capitalist parties, calling themselves Conservative and Liberal, contended for the spoils of office and the honor and glory of governing, to an arena in which the Proletariat and the Proprietariat face each other on a series of questions which are all parts of two main questions: first, whether the national land and capital and industry shall be held and controlled by the nation for the nation, or left in the hands of a small body of private men to do as they please with; second, whilst the capitalist system lasts, which shall be top dog, the provider of capital or the provider of labor. The first is a Socialist question, because until land and capital and the control of industry are in the hands of the Government it cannot equalize the distribution either of the product or of the labor of producing it.
The second is a Trade Unionist question. The Labor Party consists not only of Socialists aiming at equality of income, but of Trade Unionists who have no objection to the continuance of the capitalist method in industry provided that Labor gets the lion’s share. It should be easier to maintain the capitalist system with the proletarians taking the lion’s share, and the landlords, capitalists, and employers reduced to comparative penury, than to maintain it as at present; for the laborers and mechanics and their wives and daughters form about nine-tenths of the nation; and on all accounts it should be safer and steadier to have only one discontented person to every nine contented ones than nine discontented persons to every one contented one. To put it another way, it should be easier for a government supported by nine-tenths of the voters to collect income tax and supertax from landlords and capitalists until they had to sell their country houses and motor cars to their tenants and employees, and live in the gardener’s cottage themselves, than it is for a landlord to collect his rents or a capitalist to find investments on which he can live in luxury. An engineer designing a Forth Bridge, or an architect a cathedral or a palace, can quite easily be reduced to accept less money for his work than the riveters and fitters and masons and bricklayers and painters who carry out the designs. It is true that labor could no more do without them than they could do without labor; but labor would have the advantage in bargaining, because the talented worker, sooner than waste his talent, would rather exercise it for a low wage than fix rivets or pile bricks for a high one. At his own job he will work on any terms for the pleasure of working, and loathe any other job; whilst the reluctant laborer will do nothing for nothing and very little for a halfpenny.
Thus a Trade Unionist Government, with the mass of the people at its back, could, by ruthless taxation of unearned incomes, by Factory Acts, by Wages Boards fixing wages, by Commissions fixing prices, by using the income tax to subsidize trades in which wages were low (all of these devices are already established in parliamentary practice) could redistribute the national income in such a way that the present rich would become the poor, and the laborer would be cock of the walk. What is more, that arrangement would be much more stable than the present state of affairs in which the many are poor and the few rich. The only threat to its permanence would come from the owners of property refusing to go on collecting rent and interest merely to have it nearly all seized by the tax collector. If you have a thousand a year and a turn for business, you must sometimes feel that you are really only collecting money for the Government at a commission of seventy per cent or thereabouts. Suppose the commission were reduced to twenty-five per cent, what could you do but pay £750 out of your thousand as helplessly as you now pay £250? Just as the owners of property, when they controlled Parliament, used their power to extort the utmost farthing from Labor, Labor can and probably will use its power to extort the utmost farthing from Property unless equal distribution for all is made a fundamental constitutional dogma. At present the propertied classes are looking to capitalist Trade Unions to save them from Socialism. The time is coming when they will clamor for Socialism to save them from capitalist Trade Unionism: that is, from Capitalized Labor. Already in America Trade Unionism is combining with Big Business to squeeze the sleeping partner. More of that later on.