THE NATURAL LIMIT TO LIBERTY

ONCE for all, we are not born free; and we never can be free. When all the human tyrants are slain or deposed there will still be the supreme tyrant that can never be slain or deposed, and that tyrant is Nature. However easygoing Nature may be in the South Sea Islands, where you can bask in the sun and have food for the trouble of picking it up, even there you have to build yourself a hut, and, being a woman, to bear and rear children with travail and trouble. And, as the men are handsome and quarrelsome and jealous, and, having little else to do except make love, combine exercise with sport by killing oneanother, you have to defend yourself with your own hands.

But in our latitudes Nature is a hard taskmaster. In primitive conditions it was only by working strenuously early and late that we could feed and clothe and shelter ourselves sufficiently to be able to survive the rigors of our climate. We were often beaten by famine and flood, wolves and untimely rain and storms; and at best the women had to bear large families to make up for the deaths of children. They had to make the clothes of the family and bake its bread as well as cook its meals. Such leisure as a modern woman enjoys was not merely reprehensible: it was impossible. A chief had to work hard for his power and privileges as lawgiver, administrator, and chief of police; and had even his most pampered wife attempted to live as idly and wastefully as thousands of ordinary ladies now do with impunity, he would certainly have corrected her with a stick as thick as his thumb, and been held not only guiltless, but commendably active in the discharge of his obvious social duty. And the women were expected to do the like by their daughters instead of teaching them, as Victorian ladies did, that to do anything useful is disgraceful, and that if, as inevitably happens, something useful has to be done, you must ring for a servant and by no means do it yourself.

Now commercial civilization has been at root nothing more than the invention of ways of doing Nature’s tasks with less labor. Men of science invent because they want to discover Nature’s secrets; but such popular inventions as the bow and spear, the spade and plough, the wheel and arch, come from the desire to make work easier out of doors. Indoors the spinning wheel and loom, the frying-pan and poker, the scrubbing brush and soap, the needle and safety pin, make domestic work easier. Some inventions make the work harder, but also much shorter and more intelligent, or else they make operations possible that were impossible before: for instance, the alphabet, Arabic numerals, ready reckoners, logarithms, and algebra. When instead of putting your back into your work you put the horse’s or ox’s back into it, and later on set steam and explosive spirits and electricity to do the work of the strained backs, a state of things is reached in which it becomes possible for people to have less work than is good for them instead of more. The needle becomes a sewing machine, the sweeping brush becomes a vacuum cleaner, and both are driven from a switch in the wall by an engine miles away instead of being treadled and wielded by foot and hand. In Chapter 42 we had a glance at the way in which we lost the old manual skill and knowledge of materials and of buying and selling, first through division of labor (a very important invention), and then through machinery. If you engage a servant today who has been trained at a first-rate institution in the use of all the most modern domestic machinery, and take her down to a country house, I will not go quite so far yet as to warn you that though she knows how to work the buttons on an automatic electric lift or step on and off an escalator without falling on her nose, she cannot walk up or downstairs; but it may come to that before long. Meanwhile you will have on your hands a supercivilized woman whom you will be glad to replace by a girl from the nearest primitive village, if any primitive villages are left in your neighborhood.

Let us, however, confine ourselves to the bearing of all this on that pet topic of the leisured class, our personal liberty.

What is liberty? Leisure. What is leisure? Liberty. If you can at any moment in the day say “I can do as I please for the next hour” then for that hour you are at liberty. If you say “I must now do such and such things during the next hour whether I like it or not” then you are not at liberty for that hour in spite of Magna Carta, the Declaration of Rights (or of Independence), and all the other political title-deeds of your so-called freedom.

May I, without being too intrusive, follow you throughout your daily routine? You are wakened in the morning, whether you like it or not, either by a servant or by that nerve-shattering abomination an alarum clock. You must get up and light the fire and wash and dress and prepare and eat your breakfast. So far, no liberty. You simply must. Then you have to make your bed, wash up the breakfast things, sweep and tidy-up the place, and tidy yourself up, which means that you must more or less wash and re-dress your person until you are presentable enough to go out and buy fresh supplies of food and do other necessary shopping. Every meal you take involves preparation, including cooking, and washing up afterwards. In the course of these activities you will have to travel from place to place, which even in the house often means treadmill work on the stairs. You must rest a little occasionally. And finally you must go to sleep for eight hours.

In addition to all this you must earn the money to do your shopping and pay your rent and rates. This you can do in two main ways. You can work in some business for at least eight hours a day, plus the journeys to and from the place where you work. Or you can marry, in which case you will have to do for your husband and children all the preparation of meals and marketing that you had to do for yourself, to wash and dress the children until they are able to wash and dress themselves, and to do all the other things that belong to the occupation of wife and mother, including the administration of most of the family income. If you add up all the hours you are forced to spend in these ways, and subtract them from the twenty-four hours allowed you by Nature to get through them in, the remainder will be your daily leisure: that is, your liberty. Historians and journalists and political orators may assure you that the defeat of the Armada, the cutting off of King Charles’s head, the substitution of Dutch William for Scottish James on the throne, the passing of the Married Women’s Property Acts, and the conquest by the Suffragettes of Votes for Women, have set you free; and in moments of enthusiasm roused by these assurances you may sing fervently that Britons never never will be slaves. But though all these events may have done away with certain grievances from which you might be suffering if they had not occurred, they have added nothing to your leisure and therefore nothing to your liberty. The only Acts of Parliament that have really increased liberty: that is, added to the number of minutes in which a woman’s time is her own, are the Factory Acts which reduced her hours of industrial labor, the Sunday Observance Acts which forbid commercial work on every seventh day, and the Bank Holiday Acts.

You see, then, that the common trick of speaking of liberty as if we were all either free or slaves, is a foolish one. Nature does not allow any of us to be wholly free. In respect of eating and drinking and washing and dressing and sleeping and the other necessary occasions of physical life, the most incorrigible tramp, sacrificing every decency and honesty to freedom, is as much a slave for at least ten or eleven hours a day as a constitutional king, who has to live an almost entirely dictated life. An enslaved negress who has six hours a day to herself has more liberty than a “free” white woman who has only three. The white woman is free to go on strike, and the negress is not; but the negress can console herself by her freedom to commit suicide (fundamentally much the same thing), and by pitying the Englishwoman because, having so much less liberty, she is only poor white trash.

Now in our desire for liberty we all sympathize with the tramp. Our difference from him, when we do differ, is that some of us want leisure so that we may be able to work harder at the things we like than slaves, except under the most brutal compulsion, work at the things they must do. The tramp wastes his leisure and is miserable: we want to employ our leisure and be happy. For leisure, remember, is not rest. Rest, like sleep, is compulsory. Genuine leisure is freedom to do as we please, not to do nothing.

As I write, a fierce fight between the miners and the mine-owners has culminated in the increase of the miners’ daily working hours from seven to eight. It is said that the miners want a seven hours working day. This is the wrong way to put it. What the miners want is not seven hours mining but seventeen hours off, out of which Nature will take at least ten for her occasions, and locomotion another. Thus the miner, by rigidly economizing his time, cutting out all loafing, and being fortunate in the weather and season, might conceivably manage to have six hours of effective leisure out of the twenty-four on the basis of seven hours earning and eleven hours for sleep, recreation, loafing and locomotion. And it is this six hours of liberty that he wants to increase. Even when the immediate object of his clamor for shorter hours of work is only a mask for his real intention of working as long as before but receiving overtime pay (half as much again) for the last hour, his final object is to obtain more money to spend on his leisure. The pieceworker, the moment the piecework rate enables him to earn as much in three or four days as he has been accustomed to earn in a week, is as likely as not to take two or three days off instead of working as long as before for twice as much money. He wants leisure more than money.

But the conclusive instance is that of property. Women desire to be women of property because property secures to them the maximum of leisure. The woman of property need not get up at six in the morning to light the fire. She need not prepare her husband’s breakfast nor her own. She need not wash-up nor empty the slops nor make the beds. She need not do the marketing, nor any shopping except the sort she enjoys. She need not bother more about her children than she cares to. She need not even brush her own hair; and if she must still eat and sleep and wash and move from place to place, these operations are made as luxurious as possible. She can count on at least twelve hours leisure every day. She may work harder at trying on new dresses, hunting, dancing, visiting, receiving, bridge, tennis, mountain climbing, or any other hobby she may have, than a laborer’s wife works at her compulsory housekeeping; but she is doing what she likes all the time, and not what she must. And so, having her fill of liberty, she is usually an ardent supporter of every political movement that protects her privilege, and a strenuous and sometimes violently abusive opponent of every political movement that threatens to curtail her leisure or reduce the quantity of money at her disposal for its enjoyment. She clings to her position because it gives her the utmost possible liberty; and her grievance is that she finds it difficult to obtain and retain domestic servants because, though she offers them higher wages and better food and lodging and surroundings than they can secure for themselves as industrial employees, she also offers them less freedom. Their time, as they say, is never their own except for occasional evenings out. Formerly women of all classes, from governesses to scullery maids, went into domestic service because the only alternative was rough work in unbearably coarse company, and because, with comparatively gentle dispositions, they were for the most part illiterate and ignorant. Nowadays, being imprisoned in schools daily for at least nine years, they are no longer illiterate; and there are many occupations open to them (for instance, in city offices) that were formerly reserved for men. Even in rough employment the company is not so rough as it used to be; besides, women of gentle nurture are no longer physically disabled for them by the dress and habits that made the Victorian woman half an invalid. A hundred years ago a housemaid was so different from a herring-gutter or a ragpicker that she was for all business purposes an animal of another species. Today they are all “young ladies” in their leisure hours; and the single fact that a housemaid has less leisure than an industrial employee makes it impossible to obtain a housemaid who is not half imbecile in a factory town, and not easy to get one in a fishing port.

It is the same with men. But do not conclude that every woman and every man desires freedom above all things. Some people are very much afraid of it. They are so conscious that they cannot fend for themselves either industrially or morally that they feel that the only safe condition for them is one of tutelage, in which they will always have someone to tell them not only what to do but how to behave. Women of this kind seek domestic service, and men military service, not in spite of the forfeiture of their freedom but because of it. Were it not for this factor in the problem it would be harder to get domestic servants and soldiers than it is. Yet the ideal of the servant and soldier is not continual tutelage and service: it is tutelage relieved by an occasional spree. They both want to be as free as they dare. Again, the very last thing the ordinary industrial male worker wants is to have to think about his work. That is the manager’s job. What he wants to think about is his play. For its sake he wants his worktime to be as short, and his playtime as long, as he can afford. Women, from domestic necessity and habit, are more accustomed to think about their work than men; for a housewife must both work and manage; but she also is glad when her work is over.

The great problem of the distribution of the national income thus becomes also a problem of the distribution of necessary work and the distribution of leisure or liberty. And this leisure or liberty is what we all desire: it is the sphere of romance and infinite possibilities, whilst worktime is the sphere of cut and dried compulsory reality. All the inventions and expedients by which labor is made more productive are hailed with enthusiasm, and called progress, because they make more liberty possible for us. Unfortunately, we distribute the leisure gained by the invention of the machines in the most absurd way that can be conceived. Take your woman of property whom we have just discussed, with her fifteen hours leisure out of the twenty-four. How does she obtain that leisure? Not by inventing anything, but by owning machines invented by somebody else and keeping the leisure they produce all to herself, leaving those who actually work the machines with no more leisure than they had before. Do not blame her: she cannot help herself, poor lady! that is Capitalist law.

Look at it in the broader case of the whole nation. Modern methods of production enable each person in the nation to produce much more than they need consume to keep themselves alive and reproduce themselves. That means that modern methods produce not only a national fund of wealth but a national fund of leisure or liberty. Now just as you can distribute the wealth so as to make a few people monstrously rich whilst leaving all the rest as poor as before, you can distribute the leisure in such a way as to make a few people free for fifteen hours a day whilst the rest remain as they were, with barely four hours to dispose of as they please. And this is exactly what the institution of private property has done, and why a demand for its abolition and for the equal distribution of the national leisure or liberty among the whole population has arisen under the banner of Socialism.

Let us try to make a rough picture of what would happen if leisure, and consequently productive work, were equally distributed. Let us pretend that if we all worked four hours a day for thirtyfive years each of us could live as well as persons with at least a thousand a year do now. Let us assume that this state of things has been established by general agreement, involving a compromise between the people who want to work only two hours and live on a five-hundred-a-year scale and those who want to work four hours and live twice as expensively!

The difficulty then arises that some kinds of work will not fit themselves into instalments of four hours a day. Suppose you are married, for example. If your husband is in business there is no trouble for him. He does every day what he now does on Saturday: that is, begins at nine and knocks off at one. But what about your work? The most important work in the world is that of bearing and rearing children; for without that the human race would presently be extinct. All women’s privileges are based on that fact. Now a woman cannot be pregnant for four hours a day, and normal for the rest of it. Nor can she nurse her infant for four hours and neglect it until nine next morning. It is true that pregnancy does not involve complete and continuous disablement from every other productive activity: indeed, no fact is better established by experience than that any attempt to treat it as such is morbid and dangerous. As some writers inelegantly express it, it is not a whole time job. Nursing is much more continuously exacting, as children in institutions who receive only what ignorant people call necessary attention mostly die, whilst home children who are played with and petted and coddled and tossed and sung-to survive with a dirty rag or two for clothing, and a thatched cabin with one room and a clay floor for habitation.

A four hours working day, then, does not mean that everybody can begin work at nine and leave off at one. Pregnancy and nursing are only items in the long list of vitally important occupations that cannot be interrupted and resumed at the sound of a hooter. It is possible in a factory to keep a continuous process going by having six shifts of workers to succeed oneanother during the twentyfour hours, so that each shift works no more than four hours; but a ship, being a home as well as a workplace, cannot accommodate six crews. Even if we built warships big enough to hold 5000 and carry food for them, the shifts could not retire from Jutland battles at the end of each spell of four hours. Nor is such leisure as is possible on board ship the equivalent of shore leisure, as the leisured passengers, with their silly deck games, and their agonized scamperings fore and aft for exercise know only too well.

Then there are the jobs that cannot be done in shifts because they must be done by the same person throughout with a continuance that stretches human endurance to the utmost limit. A chemist or physicist watching an experiment, an astronomer watching an eclipse, a doctor or nurse watching a difficult case, a Cabinet minister dealing with news from the front during a war, a farmer saving his hay in the face of an unfavorable weather forecast, or a body of scavengers clearing away a snowfall, must go on if necessary until they drop, four hours or no four hours. Handel’s way of composing an oratorio was to work at it night and day until it was finished, keeping himself awake as best he might. Explorers are lucky if they do not die of exhaustion, as many of them have, from prolonged effort and endurance.

A four hour working day therefore, though just as feasible as an eight hour day is now, or the five day week which is the latest cry, is in practice only a basis of calculation. In factory and office work, and cognate occupations out of doors, it can be carried out literally. It may mean short and frequent holidays or long and rare ones. I do not know what happens to you in this respect; but in my own case, in spite of the most fervent resolutions to order my work more sensibly, and of the fact that an author’s work can as a rule quite well be divided into limited daily periods, I am usually obliged to work myself to the verge of a complete standstill and then go away for many weeks to recuperate. Eight or nine months overwork, and three or four months change and overleisure, is very common among professional persons.

Then there is a vital difference between routine work and what is called creative or original work. When you hear of a man achieving eminence by working sixteen hours a day for thirty years, you may admire that apparently unnatural feat; but you must not conclude that he has any other sort of ability: in fact you may quite safely put him down as quite incapable of doing anything that has not been done before, and doing it in the old way. He never has to think or invent. To him today’s work is a repetition of yesterday’s work. Compare him, for example, with Napoleon. If you are interested in the lives of such people you are probably tired of hearing how Napoleon could keep on working with fierce energy long after all the members of his council were so exhausted that they could not even pretend to keep awake. But if you study the less often quoted memoirs of his secretary Bourrienne you will learn that Napoleon often moodled about for a week at a time doing nothing but play with children or read trash or waste his time helplessly. During his enforced leisure in St Helena, which he enjoyed so little that he probably often exclaimed, after Cowper’s Selkirk, “Better live in the midst of alarms than dwell in this horrible place”, he was asked how long a general lasted. He replied, “Six years”. An American president is not expected to last more than four years. In England, where there is no law to prevent a worn-out dotard from being Prime Minister, even so imposing a parliamentary figure as Gladstone had to be practically superannuated when he tried to continue into the eighteen-nineties the commanding activities which had exhausted him in the seventies. To descend to more commonplace instances you cannot make an accountant work as long as a bookkeeper, nor a historian as continuously as a scrivener or typist, though they are performing the same arithmetical and manual operations. One will be tired out in three hours: the other can do eight without turning a hair with the help of a snack or a cup of tea to relieve her boredom occasionally. In the face of such differences you cannot distribute work equally and uniformly in quantities measured by time. What you can do is to give the workers, on the whole, equal leisure, bearing in mind that rest and recuperation are not leisure, and that periods of necessary recuperation in idleness must be counted as work, and often very irksome work, to those who have been prostrated by extraordinary efforts excessively prolonged.

The long and short of it is that freedom with a large F, general and complete, has no place in nature. In practice the questions that arise in its name are, first, how much leisure can we afford to allow ourselves? and second, how far can we be permitted to do what we like when we are at leisure? For instance, may we hunt stags on Dartmoor? Some of us say no; and if our opinion becomes law, the liberty of the Dartmoor Hunt will be curtailed to that extent. May we play golf on Sundays during church hours? Queen Elizabeth would not only have said no, but made churchgoing compulsory, and thereby have made Sunday a half-holiday instead of a whole one. Nowadays we enjoy the liberty of Sunday golf. Under Charles II, on the other hand, women were not allowed to attend Quaker meetings, and were flogged if they did. In fact attendance at any sort of religious service except that of the Church of England was a punishable offence; and though it was not possible to enforce this law fully against Roman Catholics and Jews, its penalties were ruthlessly inflicted on George Fox and John Bunyan, though King Charles himself sympathized with them. It cost us a revolution to establish comparative “liberty of conscience”; and we can now build and attend handsome temples of The Church of Christ Scientist, and form fantastic Separatist sects by the score if it pleases us.

On the other hand many things that we were free to do formerly we may not do now. In England until quite lately, as in Italy to this day, when a woman married, all her property became her husband’s; and if she had the ill luck to marry a drunken blackguard, he could leave her to make a home for herself and her children by her own work, and then come back and seize everything she possessed and spend it in drink and debauchery. He could do it again and again, and sometimes did. Attempts to remedy this were denounced by happily married pious people as attacks on the sanctity of the marriage tie; and women who advocated a change were called unwomanly; but at last commonsense and decency prevailed; and in England a married woman is now so well protected from plunder and rapine committed by her husband that a Married Men’s Rights agitation has begun.

Outside the home a factory owner might and did work little children to death with impunity, and do or leave undone anything he liked in his factory. Today he can no more do what he likes there than you can do what you like in Westminster Abbey. He is compelled by law to put up in a conspicuous place a long list of the things he must do and the things he may not do, whether he likes it or not. And when he is at leisure he is still subject to laws that restrict his freedom and impose duties and observances on him. He may not drive his motor car faster than twenty miles an hour (though he always does), and must drive on the left and pass on the right in England, and drive to the right and pass on the left in France. In public he must wear at least some clothing, even when he is taking a sunbath. He may not shoot wild birds or catch fish for sport except during certain seasons of the year; and he may not shoot children for sport at all. And the liberty of women in these respects is limited as the liberty of men is.

I need not bother you with more instances: you can think of dozens for yourself. Suffice it that without leisure there is no liberty, and without law there is no secure leisure. In an ideal free State, the citizen at leisure would find herself headed off by a police officer (male or female) whenever she attempted to do something that her fellow citizens considered injurious to them, or even to herself; but the assumption would be that she had a most sacred right to do as she pleased, however eccentric her conduct might appear, provided it was not mischievous. It is the contrary assumption that she must not do anything that she is not expressly licensed to do, like a child who must come to its mother and ask leave to do anything that is not in the daily routine, that destroys liberty. There is in British human nature, and I daresay in human nature in general, a very strong vein of pure inhibitiveness. Never forget the children in Punch, who, discussing how to amuse themselves, decided to find out what the baby was doing and tell it it mustnt. Forbiddance is an exercise of power; and we all have a will to personal power which conflicts with the will to social freedom. It is right that it should be jealously resisted when it leads to acts of irresponsible tyranny. But when all is said, the people who shout for freedom without understanding its limitations, and call Socialism or any other advance in civilization slavery because it involves new laws as well as new liberties, are as obstructive to the extension of leisure and liberty as the more numerous victims of the Inhibition Complex who, if they could, would handcuff everybody rather than face the risk of having their noses punched by somebody.