7
SEVEN WAYS PROPOSED
A PLAN which has often been proposed, and which seems very plausible to the working classes, is to let every person have that part of the wealth of the country which she has herself produced by her work (the feminine pronoun here includes the masculine). Others say let us all get what we deserve; so that the idle and dissolute and weak shall have nothing and perish, and the good and industrious and energetic shall have all and survive. Some believe in “the good old rule, the simple plan, that they shall take who have the power, and they shall keep who can”, though they seldom confess it nowadays. Some say let the common people get enough to keep them alive in that state of life to which it has pleased God to call them; and let the gentry take the rest, though that, too, is not now said so openly as it was in the eighteenth century. Some say let us divide ourselves into classes; and let the division be equal in each class though unequal between the classes; so that laborers shall get thirty shillings a week, skilled workers three or four pounds, bishops two thousand five hundred a year, judges five thousand, archbishops fifteen thousand, and their wives what they can get out of them. Others say simply let us go on as we are.
What the Socialists say is that none of these plans will work well, and that the only satisfactory plan is to give everybody an equal share no matter what sort of person she is, or how old she is, or what sort of work she does, or who or what her father was.
If this, or any of the other plans, happens to startle and scandalize you, please do not blame me or throw my book into the fire. I am only telling you the different plans that have been proposed and to some extent actually tried. You are not bound to approve of any of them; and you are quite free to propose a better plan than any of them if you can think one out. But you are not free to dismiss it from your mind as none of your business. It is a question of your food and lodging, and therefore part of your life. If you do not settle it for yourself, the people who are encouraging you to neglect it will settle it for you; and you may depend on it they will take care of their own shares and not of yours, in which case you may find yourself some day without any share at all.
I have seen that happen very cruelly during my own lifetime. In the country where I was born, which is within an hour’s run of England at the nearest point, many ladies of high social standing and gentle breeding, who thought that this question did not concern them because they were well off for the moment, ended very pitiably in the workhouse. They felt that bitterly, and hated those who had brought it about; but they never understood why it happened. Had they understood from the beginning how and why it might happen, they might have averted it, instead of, as they did, doing everything in their power to hasten their own ruin.
You may very easily share their fate unless you take care to understand what is happening. The world is changing very quickly, as it was around them when they thought it as fixed as the mountains. It is changing much more quickly around you; and I promise you that if you will be patient enough to finish this book (think of all the patience it has cost me to finish it instead of writing plays!) you will come out with much more knowledge of how things are changing, and what your risks and prospects are, than you are likely to have learnt from your schoolbooks.
Therefore I am going to take all these plans for you one after another, and examine them chapter by chapter until you know pretty well all that is to be said for and against them.