Chapter III
BUSINESS
IN writing as I have done concerning the lives of the common people, I do not wish to be understood as thinking that the life of the average business man is a very desirable one. I know it is not; the men who conduct large or small businesses often endure all “the torments of the damned” in their anxiety and worry to keep things straight. The more good-hearted they are and the more honest they strive to be, the more difficult and stormy their path through life becomes. There is very little mercy in business, and precious little consideration for other people; and this because men are fearful of to-morrow. We all forget the beautiful saying of Jesus: “Consider the lilies of the field; they toil not, neither do they spin, yet I say unto you Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” Or that other great saying: “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you.” Those who have risen from the ranks of the workers are most fearful. For them life is usually one long determined fight against any chance of falling back into the ranks of labour, and an effort to save their children from ever becoming mere wage-earners. Consequently business has become a sort of accentuated class war, or, rather, a fight between warring sections of the same class, each striving to supplant the other. The shop-keepers of almost every class lead the narrowest kind of lives. All their waking hours are spent in an endeavour to find new means by which they can induce people to buy things (often things which the buyers do not really want), and in a great effort, not only to retain their position, but to improve it.
The mania for advertising, the craze for new methods of boosting wares, gives rise to what amounts to wholesale lying by means of specious advertising. I once dined with a well-known social worker who spent a huge fortune investigating social and industrial conditions. After dinner we discussed at some length the question of commercial morality. I rather hotly contended that all modern business necessitated lying in one form or another until the business became a first-class monopoly, when, because of the power which monopoly gives, it became unnecessary to do more than just fling the goods on the market. The lady of the house was much distressed, and asked her husband if it was true that lying was a necessary part of business. He hesitated, but at last replied that when business was conducted men did not tell all the truth, but that, as all business men knew this, it was not really lying in the ordinary sense. I could not answer except by saying that the fact that we all tolerated such an unreal and deceptive condition of affairs was, in my opinion, the greatest condemnation of our present commercial methods. And so it is, for it stamps us all as deceivers, and makes of business just a battle of wits in which cupidity stands the best chance of success.
There are, no doubt, great businesses which, as I have said, are so big, and have such huge powers as the result of monopoly and vested interest, that they need not resort to these means for accumulating wealth. They succeed, however, by the most merciless use of the powers which monopoly gives. This may, for instance, be a land monopoly, which is the oldest and most anti-social monopoly of all; in fact, every other monopoly has grown out of this power of controlling land; without such power it is very doubtful if monopoly of other things could come into being at all. It is land monopoly which has caused the workers to be housed on swamps and marshes around our great cities. I am told that in the offices of the Local Government Board there are huge maps of all the capital cities of Europe and America, and that these all show how the working classes are housed on the low-lying damp lands or in the least healthy parts of these great cities, where the rent of land is cheap. The reason is that those whose business in life is to draw huge sums by the exercise of their power to extract ground rent drive the poor to crowd themselves together on the cheapest land, and this results in over-crowding and so-called over-population. In my own life-time, and within ten minutes’ walk of where I live, I have seen huge tracts of marshland (previously filled up with the sweepings and other refuse gathered from the streets of London) converted into rows of streets, now populated by the working classes. Neither the landowner, nor the builder, nor the present owners of these houses, would for one moment dream of living either in one of these houses or even in a special house built on this land. They know only too well what an unhealthy district it is. Yet some of the land-owners and house-owners are good, decent men and women. They build chapels and churches, and on Sundays believe that all men are brothers and that God is the Father of us all. But they do not mind growing rich at the cost of the health and even the life of their poorer brothers and sisters. The sacred right to make money covers many more sins than does the virtue of charity. It is the passive acquiescence of us all in this sacred right of money-making which makes good men and women content to draw incomes from such sources.
Then there is the drink business. Volumes have been written and thousands of sermons preached to prove how drunken and dissolute the workers are. Yet brewers and distillers through their agents and managers seek out poor districts where housing conditions are bad, and where industrial conditions keep the people poor, and in these districts erect their gaudy gin palaces, with garish light and colour, tempting the weary and weak to enter and forget their misery, their sorrow and their poverty. Is it a wonder that those who are denied the pleasure and joy of real home life fall easy victims to these allurements? It is indeed no marvel they do so; the marvel is that any resist. Yet few of the bishops or clergy of any denomination dare attack these business men and declare their trade to be an immoral one; and this is because the law has not merely allowed the trade to grow up but has also by legislation made of it a most powerful monopoly. Because of this monopoly good people have invested many, many millions of pounds in a business which sends more people to perdition than almost any other evil of our day. Whenever it is proposed to tackle this evil it is Christians who at once raise the question as to the moral right of the nation to destroy so profitable a business, once it has been established by law—even if such a business ruins the health and character of multitudes of people! There are many working people who believe that this evil is not properly tackled because those whose business it is to teach the nation its duty in a social and spiritual sense derive their incomes from this traffic, as many good people in former days opposed the abolition of slavery because of their money investments in slaves.
We shall never settle this drink question till we abolish all private monopoly or private gain in the liquor trade. If there is to be a monopoly of the kind it should be a State monopoly, from which every vestige of profit-making should be taken away. There is little chance of this happening until our whole conception of the right of property is changed. There was a chance at the beginning of the war when an effort was made, but money interests were too strong, and we can all see how in Parliament a small group of determined men can keep back, and do keep back, true reform on this and many other social questions.
But the war has taught us better than anything else could have done what the words “business is business” really mean. Our nation for the past two and a half years has been in the throes of the most terrible struggle in all her varied history. Millions of men have risked health and life itself in what they believed to be the defence of their Motherland. Boys and men from every quarter of the globe have hurried home to give all they have for the service of the land they love. Those of us who hate and detest this and every other kind of war, and who refuse to take any part in it, equally with those who support the war, must and do respect and honour all those who give themselves on behalf of the cause they love. None of those who volunteered—and they numbered millions—haggled about pay or reward; they simply gave themselves. Indeed, everywhere people were found who felt impelled to offer service. Only the business men refused to turn aside from the one pervading occupation of their lives—money-making. In every direction business men took advantage of the nation’s difficulties to make more and more money. Shipping companies quadrupled their profits; corndealers and millers, coal merchants and meat dealers—in fact, everybody with anything to sell—scrambled in and joined the gamble to make money out of the war. Shipbuilding firms, armament manufacturers, Government contractors and others, considered the opportunity was one which it would be unbusinesslike and foolish to miss. People who supplied stores were not ashamed in public court to confess to a profit of 40 per cent. Coal and iron corporations in Durham who have managed to acquire huge properties consisting of land and coal are paying dividends of 45 per cent. In short, some business men have had a glorious time since the war began; but their success has resulted in well-nigh starving old-age pensioners to death, and has brought the wives and dependents of soldiers and sailors, in spite of increased allowances, to the point of semi-starvation whilst their husbands, brothers, and sons are fighting to defend a land of which they possess not a yard, and within whose borders are these social enemies, operating their profit-making business to the detriment of the rest of the nation. Again, leaders of religion, almost to a man, are silent (except for the feeblest of feeble protests), whilst Ministers in Parliament spend their time proving that high prices and high profits have no connection with each other, but that both are due, in some mysterious manner, to the Germans and the war in general.
My object in calling attention to these matters is to emphasise the point that there is no soul in business. It is a thing apart, in the carrying on of which people are expected to banish out of their minds all ideas of human kindness. I am not unmindful of the fact that there are, relatively speaking, many good business men and employers; if there were not, the whole system would have smashed up long ago. Men like the Cadburys, Rowntrees, and Levers, with their garden cities, strive to make life more tolerable for the workers by gifts of a little more material comfort, but even these do not concede freedom or true equal partnership; the relationship all the time is that of master and servant. Moreover, in such cases it is the centralised power which enables whatever is of value to be done. The great mass of businesses are carried on by limited companies or corporations, and the beneficiaries of these businesses are shareholders who have not the slightest idea of how their money is obtained, or under what conditions. So wide-spread are business organisations that a company interested in motor-cars and tyres may also be interested in the exploitation of the inhabitants of such places as Putumayo, where, we know, the people were horribly ill-used and murdered in order to secure profits and dividends for Christian people. We also know that many good Christians quite unknowingly participated in the slavery of San Thomé and the Congo.
Then there is the gambling in stocks and shares on the Stock Exchanges of the world—a kind of business where no sort of useful work is ever done! This has always appeared to me to be like gambling with the labour of the people, just as other people gamble on the racing ability of horses; for no one will contend that passing paper adds value to any mortal thing in the world. The fact that I buy something to-day and, because of market changes, can sell it at double price to-morrow, may stamp me as a clear-headed business man, but cannot possibly prove I have added a single service of the slightest worth to the community. The hordes of men and women engaged in so-called money-making industries which produce nothing is simply appalling; and some day we shall see much more clearly than we do now, and shall realise how useless, so far as the community is concerned, all this gambling really is. We should see it more clearly now were it not for the fact that money obscures the issue. We are all apt to think that the possession of money is the all-important thing; but it is undeniable that if all the gold in the world could be destroyed the nations would be no poorer, so long as the land remained to be tilled, and men and women were willing to till it.
It is the business of business people and their apologists to make believe that without money we should all starve. That this is not so is so simple a proposition that people refuse to believe it. Yet no one will deny that if all the gold and diamonds in the world could be gathered together with their owners and placed on an uninhabited island, these valuables would not produce a single atom of food. Men and women will always, I imagine, desire to possess rare and precious stones and minerals for ornaments and personal adornment, but they will not for ever allow the possession of these things to be used as a means for impoverishing and starving one another.
In addition to what I have already said, there is the further fact that so much of our business to-day is unnecessary. In every direction we can see overlapping and competition. Each new invention appears to create an increasing number of those who do not produce, and makes more of us mere handlers of other people’s labour. In almost every village, certainly in every town, large and small, there are people cutting each other’s throats, often in what appears to be a vain endeavour to grow rich and prosperous. Every day of the week multitudes of commercial travellers cover the country striving to sell the same kind of goods in competition with each other. All the great combinations of capital strive to eliminate this kind of waste, and the justification urged in defence of great monopolies is that by combination economy is effected. So it is; but those who benefit from this economy are the owners of the combined concern. They combine in order to make more money, and it is worth while noticing that those who most glibly denounce the workers because they combine are the most ready themselves to enter into a combination if by so doing they may amass more money. The capitalist class is rapidly learning that co-operation amongst themselves is much more profitable than competition. The mass of the people will one day discover that it is better for them to co-operate, and, when they do make the discovery, business, as we understand it to-day, will be cast away into the limbo of forgotten things.
In the meantime let us all strive to realise that for all business men, except the very rich, life is one long weary fight against conditions which tend to kill the good there is in us; that, just as the poverty-stricken conditions of life under which the poor are doomed to exist rob them of all the beauty and joy of living, so the mad scramble to get rich, the struggle to rise in the social scale by means of money and money’s worth, robs those engaged in it of everything of real worth, and makes them become just sordid and money-grubbing beings, whose sole idea of value is whether a thing will pay, not in service to the community, but in pounds, shillings, and pence.
There have, it is true, been splendid men and women of the wealthy classes who, seeing the misery and degradation of the people, have set to work to collect facts and figures in order that all the world may know “how the poor live.” One such was the Rt. Hon. Charles Booth; Mr. Seebohm Rowntree is another; and their works on life and labour tell their own story, and in a very real way show conditions as they are. But no one has yet thought it worth while to suggest a social investigation into the life and labour of the business and possessing classes. I wish the labour movement would appoint a special commission, consisting of their best men and women, thoroughly to investigate the conditions of life prevailing in Belgravia and Mayfair and tell the world “how the rich live”—whence come their means of life, and what they do to fill up each day, whether with useful or useless work. I am sure we should discover from such an inquiry that the rich people are no more contented or happy than the rest of us, that riches not earned by actual productive labour are Dead Sea fruit, and that life for the rich is one long weary search for happiness which never comes their way for any length of time. We should discover, too, that more and more people are becoming dissatisfied with their lives, that scrambling for “wealth” (which is not wealth in any good sense of the word) is a kind of existence which takes the joy out of life.
The reason such a condition of things is tolerated is, I believe, simply that we all fear each other. We are afraid of the consequences of “burning our boats,” and we dare not cast ourselves on the mercy of our fellow men and women, for we have no faith either in them or in ourselves, or in our religion which tells us to “Cast all your care upon Him, for He careth for you.” We are surrounded by conventions and customs which few of us dare to break, and which fewer still dare publicly to call in question. Until we have faith and hope and confidence in each other, we shall continue our business methods of buying cheap and selling dear, nursing all the time the vain delusion that if once we determine to do right, evil will immediately prosper, instead of understanding that righteousness, whether exercised by an individual or by a nation, is always more powerful than evil.
We men who have been, and still are, in business have to realise that money is not wealth, that a nation may have great banks with huge stores of gold, may have within its ranks men and women who own great possessions of material things, but may have also multitudes of those who have nowhere to lay their heads. A nation in such a plight is not rich, but very poor, for it has not learnt the simple lesson that the true law of life is to give, and that gold is not God. Going about London, I often notice the manner in which gold is splashed about in order to impress us with its value. Our grand cathedral church has its cross of gold and its towers gilded with the same metal; the new Courts of Justice at the Old Bailey are crowned by a figure of gold, as if the one object of adoration and power in the City of London were gold. Business men must change all this if our nation is to live. Their clever, ingenious brains must be used to amass happiness for all, not gold for themselves and misery for their neighbours. It is a mistake to envy the business man. Stand, as I have done, and see them rolling through the City in their motor-cars, driving in one long line to business every morning, and notice the tense look of anxiety and worry stamped on most of their faces; and, if you are fortunate enough to know them, see, as the days pass, the hard sort of expression which comes over their faces, like a mask, crushing out all the most beautiful expressions of which the human face is capable. And, having done this, ask yourself if, after all, the business man’s life is so desirable and the worship of gold so profitable an occupation! No; instead of envying them, we all should look on them with pity, pity because they are doomed to appear as wealthy and yet are amongst the poorest of all God’s creatures; because so often their whole lives are one long fight against their fellow-men—a fight which leaves them friendless and lonely in the world of men and women.