WHAT WE SHOULD BUY FIRST

TO test the effects of our unequal division of the nation’s income on our national institutions and on the life and prosperity of the whole people we must view the industry of the country, and see how it is affected by inequality of income. We must view one by one the institution of marriage, the working of the courts of justice, the honesty of our Houses of Parliament, the spiritual independence of the Church, the usefulness of our schools, and the quality of our newspapers, and consider how each of them is dependent on the way in which money is distributed.

Beginning with industry, we are at once plunged into what we call political economy, to distinguish it from the domestic economy with which we are all only too familiar. Men find political economy a dry and difficult subject: they shirk it as they shirk housekeeping; yet it means nothing more abstruse than the art of managing a country as a housekeeper manages a house. If the men shirk it the women must tackle it. The nation has a certain income to manage on just as a housekeeper has; and the problem is how to spend that income to the greatest general advantage.

Now the first thing a housekeeper has to settle is what things are wanted most, and what things can be done without at a pinch. This means that the housekeeper must settle the order in which things are desirable. For example, if, when there is not enough food in the house, she goes out and spends all her money on a bottle of scent and an imitation pearl necklace, she will be called a vain and silly woman and a bad mother. But a stateswoman would call her simply a bad economist: one who does not know what should come first when money has to be spent. No woman is fit to have charge of a household who has not sense and self-control enough to see that food and clothing and housing and firing come first, and that bottles of scent and pearl necklaces, imitation or real, come a long way afterwards. Even in the jeweller’s shop a wrist watch comes before a necklace as being more useful. I am not saying that pretty things are not useful: they are very useful and quite right in their proper order; but they do not come first. A Bible may be a very proper present to give to a child; but to give a starving child a Bible instead of a piece of bread and a cup of milk would be the act of a lunatic. A woman’s mind is more wonderful than her flesh; but if her flesh is not fed her mind will perish, whereas if you feed her flesh her mind will take care of itself and of her flesh as well. Food comes first.

Think of the whole country as a big household, and the whole nation as a big family, which is what they really are. What do we see? Half-fed, badly clothed, abominably housed children all over the place; and the money that should go to feed and clothe and house them properly being spent in millions on bottles of scent, pearl necklaces, pet dogs, racing motor cars, January strawberries that taste like corks, and all sorts of extravagances. One sister of the national family has a single pair of leaking boots that keep her sniffing all through the winter, and no handkerchief to wipe her nose with. Another has forty pairs of high-heeled shoes and dozens of handkerchiefs. A little brother is trying to grow up on a penn’orth of food a day, and is breaking his mother’s heart and wearing out her patience by asking continually for more, whilst a big brother, spending five or six pounds on his dinner at a fashionable hotel, followed by supper at a night club, is in the doctor’s hands because he is eating and drinking too much.

Now this is shockingly bad political economy. When thoughtless people are asked to explain it they say “Oh, the woman with the forty shoes and the man drinking at the night club got their money from their father who made a fortune by speculating in rubber; and the girl with the broken boots, and the troublesome boy whose mother has just clouted his head, are only riffraff from the slums”. That is true; but it does not alter the fact that the nation that spends money on champagne before it has provided enough milk for its babies, or gives dainty meals to Sealyham terriers and Alsatian wolf-hounds and Pekingese dogs whilst the infant mortality rate shews that its children are dying by thousands from insufficient nourishment, is a badly managed, silly, vain, stupid, ignorant nation, and will go to the bad in the long run no matter how hard it tries to conceal its real condition from itself by counting the pearl necklaces and Pekingese dogs as wealth, and thinking itself three times as rich as before when all the pet dogs have litters of six puppies a couple. The only way in which a nation can make itself wealthy and prosperous is by good housekeeping: that is, by providing for its wants in the order of their importance, and allowing no money to be wasted on whims and luxuries until necessities have been thoroughly served.

But it is no use blaming the owners of the dogs. All these mischievous absurdities exist, not because any sane person ever wanted them to exist, but because they must occur whenever some families are very much richer than others. The rich man, who, as husband and father, drags the woman with him, begins as every one else begins, by buying food, clothing, and a roof to shelter them. The poor man does the same. But when the poor man has spent all he can afford on these necessaries, he is still short of them: his food is insufficient; his clothes are old and dirty; his lodging is a single room or part of one, and unwholesome even at that. But when the rich man has fed himself, and dressed himself, and housed himself as sumptuously as possible, he has still plenty of money left to indulge his tastes and fancies and make a show in the world. Whilst the poor man says “I want more bread, more clothes, and a better house for my family; but I cannot pay for them”, the rich man says “I want a fleet of motor cars, a yacht, diamonds and pearls for my wife and daughters, and a shooting-box in Scotland. Money is no object: I can pay and overpay for them ten times over”. Naturally men of business set to work at once to have the cars and the yacht made, the diamonds dug out in Africa, the pearls fished for, and the shooting lodge built, paying no attention to the poor man with his crying needs and empty pockets.

To put the same thing in another way, the poor man needs to have labor employed in making the things he is short of: that is, in baking, weaving, tailoring, and plain building; but he cannot pay the master bakers and weavers enough to enable them to pay the wages of such labor. The rich man meanwhile is offering money enough to provide good wages for all the work required to please him. All the people who take his money may be working hard; but their work is pampering people who have too much instead of feeding people who have too little; therefore it is misapplied and wasted, keeping the country poor and even making it poorer for the sake of keeping a few people rich.

It is no excuse for such a state of things that the rich give employment. There is no merit in giving employment: a murderer gives employment to the hangman; and a motorist who runs over a child gives employment to an ambulance porter, a doctor, an undertaker, a clergyman, a mourning-dressmaker, a hearse driver, a gravedigger: in short, to so many worthy people that when he ends by killing himself it seems ungrateful not to erect a statue to him as a public benefactor. The money with which the rich give the wrong sort of employment would give the right sort of employment if it were equally distributed; for then there would be no money offered for motor cars and diamonds until everyone was fed, clothed, and lodged, nor any wages offered to men and women to leave useful employments and become servants to idlers. There would be less ostentation, less idleness, less wastefulness, less uselessness; but there would be more food, more clothing, better houses, more security, more health, more virtue: in a word, more real prosperity.