¶I once debated with a learned man who had a curious fancy for arranging the correspondence in mathematical patterns; first a thousand words each and then a hundred words each—and then altering them all to another pattern. I accepted as I would always accept a challenge, especially an apparent appeal for fairness, but I was tempted to tell him how utterly unworkable this mechanical method is for a living thing like argument. Obviously a man might need a thousand words to reply to ten words. Suppose I began the philosophic dialogue by saying, “You strangle babies.” He would naturally reply, “Nonsense—I never strangled any babies.” And even in that obvious ejaculation he has already used twice as many words as I have. It is impossible to have real debate without digression. Every definition will look like a digression. Suppose somebody puts to me some journalistic statement, say, “Spanish Jesuits denounced in Parliament.” I cannot deal with it without explaining to the journalist where I differ from him about the atmosphere and implication of each term in turn. I cannot answer quickly if I am just discovering slowly that the man suffers from a series of extraordinary delusions: as (1) that Parliament is a popular representative assembly; (2) that Spain is an effete and decadent country; or (3) that a Spanish Jesuit is a sort of soft-footed court chaplain; whereas it was a Spanish Jesuit who anticipated the whole democratic theory of our day, and actually hurled it as a defiance against the divine right of kings. Each of these explanations would have to be a digression, and each would be necessary. Now in this book I am well aware that there are many digressions that may not at first sight seem to be necessary. For I have had to construct it out of what was originally a sort of controversial causerie; and it has proved impossible to cut down the causerie and only leave the controversy. Moreover, no man can controvert with many foes without going into many subjects, as every one knows who has been heckled. And on this occasion I was, I am happy to say, being heckled by many foes who were also friends. I was discharging the double function of writing essays and of talking over the tea-table, or preferably over the tavern table. To turn this sort of mixture of a gossip and a gospel into anything like a grammar of Distributism has been quite impossible. But I fancy that, even considered as a string of essays, it appears more inconsequent than it really is; and many may read the essays without quite seeing the string. I have decided, therefore, to add this last essay merely in order to sum up the intention of the whole; even if the summary be only a recapitulation. I have had a reason for many of my digressions, which may not appear until the whole is seen in some sort of perspective; and where the digression has no such justification, but was due to a desire to answer a friend or (what is even worse) a disposition towards idle and unseemly mirth, I can only apologize sincerely to the scientific reader and promise to do my best to make this final summary as dull as possible.
¶If we proceed as at present in a proper orderly fashion, the very idea of property will vanish. It is not revolutionary violence that will destroy it. It is rather the desperate and reckless habit of not having a revolution. The world will be occupied, or rather is already occupied, by two powers which are now one power. I speak, of course, of that part of the world that is covered by our system, and that part of the history of the world which will last very much longer than our time. Sooner or later, no doubt, men would rediscover so natural a pleasure as property. But it might be discovered after ages, like those ages filled with pagan slavery. It might be discovered after a long decline of our whole civilization. Barbarians might rediscover it and imagine it was a new thing.
¶Anyhow, the prospect is a progress towards the complete combination of two combinations. They are both powers that believe only in combination; and have never understood or even heard that there is any dignity in division. They have never had the imagination to understand the idea of Genesis and the great myths: that Creation itself was division. The beginning of the world was the division of heaven and earth; the beginning of humanity was the division of man and woman. But these flat and platitudinous minds can never see the difference between the creative cleavage of Adam and Eve and the destructive cleavage of Cain and Abel. Anyhow, these powers or minds are now both in the same mood; and it is a mood of disliking all division, and therefore all distribution. They believe in unity, in unanimity, in harmony. One of these powers is State Socialism and the other is Big Business. They are already one spirit; they will soon be one body. For, disbelieving in division, they cannot remain divided; believing only in combination, they will themselves combine. At present one of them calls it Solidarity and the other calls it Consolidation. It would seem that we have only to wait while both monsters are taught to say Consolidarity. But, whatever it is called, there will be no doubt about the character of the world which they will have made between them. It is becoming more and more fixed and familiar. It will be a world of organization, or syndication, of standardization. People will be able to get hats, houses, holidays, and patent medicines of a recognized and universal pattern; they will be fed, clothed, educated, and examined by a wide and elaborate system; but if you were to ask them at any given moment whether the agency which housed or hatted them was still merely mercantile or had become municipal, they probably would not know, and they possibly would not care.
¶Many believe that humanity will be happy in this new peace; that classes can be reconciled and souls set at rest. I do not think things will be quite so bad as that. But I admit that there are many things which may make possible such a catastrophe of contentment. Men in large numbers have submitted to slavery; men submit naturally to government, and perhaps even especially to despotic government. But I take it as obvious to any intelligent person that this government will be something more than despotic. It is the very essence of the Trust that it has the power, not only to extinguish military rivalry or mob rebellion as has the State, but also the power to crush any new custom or costume or craft or private enterprise that it does not choose to like. Militarism can only prevent people from fighting; but monopoly can prevent them from buying or selling anything except the article (generally the inferior article) having the trade mark of the monopoly. If anything can be inferred from history and human nature, it is absolutely certain that the despotism will grow more and more despotic, and that the article will grow more and more inferior. There is no conceivable argument from psychology, by which it can be pretended that people preserving such a power, generation after generation, would not abuse it more and more, or neglect everything else more and more. We know what far less rigid rule has become, even when founded by spirited and intelligent rulers. We can darkly guess the effect of larger powers in the hands of lesser men. And if the name of Caesar came at last to stand for all that we call Byzantine, exactly what degree of dullness are we to anticipate when the name of Harrod shall sound even duller than it does? If China passed into a proverb at last for stiffness and monotony after being nourished for centuries by Confucius, what will be the condition of the brains that have been nourished for centuries by Callisthenes?
¶I leave out there the particular case of my own country, where we are threatened not with a long decline, but rather with an unpleasantly rapid collapse. But taking monopolist capitalism in a country where it is still in the vulgar sense successful, as in the United States, we only see more clearly, and on a more colossal scale, the long and descending perspectives that point down to Byzantium or Pekin. It is perfectly obvious that the whole business is a machine for manufacturing tenth-rate things, and keeping people ignorant of first-rate things. Most civilized systems have declined from a height; but this starts on a low level and in a flat place; and what it would be like when it had really crushed all its critics and rivals and made its monopoly watertight for two hundred years, the most morbid imagination will find it hard to imagine. But whatever the last stage of the story, no sane man any longer doubts that we are seeing the first stages of it. There is no longer any difference in tone and type between collectivist and ordinary commercial order; commerce has its officialism and communism has its organization. Private things are already public in the worst sense of the word; that is, they are impersonal and dehumanized. Public things are already private in the worst sense of the word; that is, they are mysterious and secretive and largely corrupt. The new sort of Business Government will combine everything that is bad in all the plans for a better world. There will be no eccentricity; no humour; no noble disdain of the world. There will be nothing but a loathsome thing called Social Service; which means slavery without loyalty. This Service will be one of the ideals. I forgot to mention that there will be ideals. All the wealthiest men in the movement have made it quite clear that they are in possession of a number of these little comforts. People always have ideals when they can no longer have ideas.
¶The philanthropists in question will probably be surprised to learn that some of us regard this prospect very much as we should regard the theory that we are to be evolved back into apes. We therefore consider whether it is even yet conceivable to restore that long-forgotten thing called Self-Government: that is, the power of the citizen in some degree to direct his own life and construct his own environment; to eat what he likes, to wear what he chooses, and to have (what the Trust must of necessity deny him) a range of choice. In these notes upon the notion, I have been concerned to ask whether it is possible to escape from this enormous evil of simplification or centralization, and what I have said is best summed up under two heads or in two parallel statements. They may seem to some to contradict each other, but they really confirm each other.
¶First, I say that this is a thing that could be done by people. It is not a thing that can be done to people. That is where it differs from nearly all Socialist schemes as it does from plutocratic philanthropy. I do not say that I, regarding this prospect with hatred and contempt, can save them from it. I say that they can save me from it, and themselves from it, if they also regard it with hatred and contempt. But it must be done in the spirit of a religion, of a revolution, and (I will add) of a renunciation. They must want to do it as they want to drive invaders out of a country or to stop the spread of a plague. And in this respect our critics have a curious way of arguing in a circle. They ask why we trouble to denounce what we cannot destroy; and offer an ideal we cannot attain. They say we are merely throwing away dirty water before we can get clean; or rather that we are merely analysing the animalculae in the dirty water, while we do not even venture to throw it away. Why do we make men discontented with conditions with which they must be content? Why revile an intolerable slavery that must be tolerated? But when we in turn ask why our ideal is impossible or why the evil is indestructible, they answer in effect, “Because you cannot persuade people to want it destroyed.” Possibly; but, on their own showing, they cannot blame us because we try. They cannot say that people do not hate plutocracy enough to kill it; and then blame us for asking them to look at it enough to hate it. If they will not attack it until they hate it, then we are doing the most practical thing we can do, in showing it to be hateful. A moral movement must begin somewhere; but I do most positively postulate that there must be a moral movement. This is not a financial flutter or a police regulation or a private bill or a detail of book-keeping. It is a mighty effort of the will of man, like the throwing off of any other great evil, or it is nothing. I say that if men will fight for this they may win; I have nowhere suggested that there is any way of winning without fighting.
¶Under this heading I have considered in their place, for instance, the possibility of an organized boycott of big shops. Undoubtedly it would be some sacrifice to boycott big shops; it would be some trouble to seek out small shops. But it would be about a hundredth part of the sacrifice and trouble that has often been shown by masses of men making some patriotic or religious protest—when they really wanted to protest. Under the same general rule, I have remarked that a real life on the land, men not only dwelling on the land but living off it, would be an adventure involving both stubbornness and abnegation. But it would not be half so ascetic as the sort of adventure which it is a commonplace to attribute to colonists and empire-builders; it is nothing to what has been normally shown by millions of soldiers and monks. Only it is true that monks have a faith, that soldiers have a flag, and that even empire-builders were presumably under the impression that they could assist the Empire. But it does not seem to me quite inconceivable, in the varieties of religious experience, that men might take as much notice of earth as monks do of heaven; that people might really believe in the spades that create as well as in the swords that destroy; and that the English who have colonized everywhere else might begin to colonize England.
¶Having thus admitted, or rather insisted, that this thing cannot be done unless people do really think it worth doing, I then proceeded to suggest that, even in these different departments, there are more people who think it worth doing than is noticed by the people who do not think it worth noticing. Thus, even in the crowds that throng the big shops, you do in fact hear a vast amount of grumbling at the big shops—not so much because they are big as because they are bad. But these real criticisms are disconnected, while the unreal puffs and praises are connected, like any other conspiracy. When the millionaire owning the stores is criticized, it is by his customers. When he is handsomely complimented, it is by himself. But when he is cursed, it is in the inner chamber; when he is praised (by himself) it is proclaimed from the house-tops. That is what is meant by publicity—a voice loud enough to drown any remarks made by the public.
¶In the case of the land, as in the case of the shops, I went on to point out that there is, if not a moral agitation, at least the materials of a moral agitation. Just as a discontent with the shops lingers even among those who are shopping, so a desire for the land lingers even in those who are hardly allowed to walk on the ground. I gave the instance of the slum population of Limehouse, who were forcibly lifted into high flats, bitterly lamenting the loss of the funny little farmyards they had constructed for themselves in the corners of their slum. It seems absurd to say of a country that none of its people could be countrymen, when even its cockneys try to be countrymen. I also noted that, in the case of the country, there is now a general discontent, in landlords as well as tenants. Everything seems to point to a simpler life of one man one field, free as far as possible of the complications of rent and labour, especially when the rent is so often unpaid or unprofitable, and the labourers are so often on strike or on the dole. Here again there may often be a million individuals feeling like this; but the million has not become a mob; for a mob is a moral thing. But I will never be so unpatriotic as to suggest that the English could never conduct an agrarian war in England as the Irish did in Ireland. Generally, therefore, under this first principle, the thing would most certainly have to be preached rather like a Crusade; but it is quite untrue and unhistorical to say, as a rule, that when once the Crusade is preached, there are no Crusaders.
¶And my second general principle, which may seem contradictory but is confirmatory, is this. I think the thing would have to be done step by step and with patience and partial concessions. I think this, not because I have any faith whatever in the silly cult of slowness that is sometimes called evolution, but because of the peculiar circumstances of the case. First, mobs may loot and burn and rob the rich man, very much to his spiritual edification and benefit. They may not unnaturally do it, almost absentmindedly, when they are thinking of something else, such as a dislike of Jews or Huguenots. But it would never do for us to give very violent shocks to the sentiment of property, even where it is very ill-placed or ill-proportioned; for that happens to be the very sentiment we are trying to revive. As a matter of psychology, it would be foolish to insult even an unfeminine feminist in order to awaken a delicate chivalry towards females. It would be unwise to use a sacred image as a club with which to thump an Iconoclast and teach him not to touch the holy images. Where the old-fashioned feeling of property is still honest, I think it should be dealt with by degrees and with some consideration. Where the sense of property does not exist at all, as in millionaires, it might well be regarded rather differently; there it would become a question of whether property procured in certain ways is property at all. As for the case of cornering and making monopolies in restraint of trade, that falls under the first of my two principles. It is simply a question of whether we have the moral courage to punish what is certainly immoral. There is no more doubt about these operations of high finance than there is about piracy on the high seas. It is merely a case of a country being so disorderly and ill-governed that it becomes infested with pirates. I have, therefore, in this book treated of Trusts and Anti-Trust Law as a matter, not merely for the popular protest of a boycott or a strike, but for the direct action of the State against criminals. But when the criminals are stronger than the State, any attempt to punish them will be certainly called a rebellion and may rightly be called a Crusade.
¶Recurring to the second principle, however, there is another and less abstract reason for recognizing that the goal must be reached by stages. I have here had to consider several things that may bring us a stage nearer to Distributism, even if they are in themselves not very satisfactory to ardent or austere Distributists. I took the examples of a Ford car, which may be made by mass production but is used for individual adventure; for, after all, a private car is more private than a train or a tram. I also took the example of a general supply of electricity, which might lead to many little workshops having a chance for the first time. I do not claim that all Distributists would agree with me in my decision here; but on the whole I am inclined to decide that we should use these things to break up the hopeless block of concentrated capital and management, even if we urge their abandonment when they have done their work. We are concerned to produce a particular sort of men, the sort of men who will not worship machines even if they use machines. But it is essential to insist at every stage that we hold ourselves free not only to cease worshipping machines, but to cease using them. It was in this connection that I criticized certain remarks of Mr. Ford and the whole of that idea of standardization which he may be said to represent. But everywhere I recognize a difference between the methods we may use to produce a saner society and the things which that saner society might itself be sane enough to do. For instance, a people who had really found out what fun it is to make things would never want to make most of them with a machine. Sculptors do not want to turn a statue out with a lathe or painters to print off a picture as a pattern, and a craftsman who was really capable of making pots or pans would be no readier to condescend to what is called manufacturing them. It is odd, by the way, that the very word “manufacture” means the opposite of what it is supposed to mean. It is itself a testimony to a better time when it did not mean the work of a modern factory. In the strict meaning of words, a sculptor does manufacture a statue, and a factory worker does not manufacture a screw.
¶But, anyhow, a world in which there were many independent men would probably be a world in which there were more individual craftsmen. When we have created anything like such a world, we may trust it to feel more than the modern world does the danger of machinery deadening creation, and the value of what it deadens. And I suggested that such a world might very well make special provision about machines, as we all do about weapons; admitting them for particular purposes, but keeping watch on them in particular ways.
¶But all that belongs to the later stage of improvement, when the commonwealth of free men already exists; I do not think it inconsistent with using any instruments that are innocent in themselves in order to help such citizens to find a footing. I have also noted that just as I do not think machinery an immoral instrument in itself, so I do not think State action an immoral instrument in itself. The State might do a great deal in the first stages, especially by education in the new and necessary crafts and labours, by subsidy or tariff to protect distributive experiments and by special laws, such as the taxation of contracts. All these are covered by what I call the second principle, that we may use intermediate or imperfect instruments; but it goes along with the first principle, that we must be perfect not only in our patience, but in our passion and our enduring indignation.
¶Lastly, there are the ordinary and obvious problems like that of population, and in that connection I fully concede that the process may sooner or later involve an element of emigration. But I think the emigration must be undertaken by those who understand the new England, and not by those who want to escape from it or from the necessity of it. Men must realize the new meaning of the old phrase, “the sacredness of private property.” There must be a spirit that will make the colonist feel at home and not abroad. And there, I admit, there is a difficulty; for I confess I know only one thing that will thus give to a new soil the sanctity of something already old and full of mystical affections. And that thing is a shrine—the real presence of a sacramental religion.
¶Thus, unavoidably, I end on the note of another controversy—a controversy that I have no idea of pursuing here. But I should not be honest if I did not mention it, and whatever be the case in that connection it is impossible to deny that there is a doctrine behind the whole of our political position. It is not necessarily the doctrine of the religious authority which I myself receive; but it cannot be denied that it must in a sense be religious. That is to say, it must at least have some reference to an ultimate view of the universe and especially of the nature of man. Those who are thus ready to see property atrophied would ultimately be ready to see arms and legs amputated. They really believe that these could become extinct organs like the appendix. In other words, there is indeed a fundamental difference between my own view and that vision of man as a merely intermediate and changing thing—a Link, if not a Missing Link. The creature, it is claimed, once went on four legs and now goes on two legs. The obvious inference would be that the next stage of evolution will be for a man to stand on one leg. And this will be of very great value to the capitalist or bureaucratic powers that are now to take charge of him. It will mean, for one thing, that only half the number of boots need be supplied to the working classes. It will mean that all wages will be of a one-legged sort. But I would testify at the end, as at the beginning, that I believe in Man standing on two legs and requiring two boots, and that I desire them to be his own boots. You may call it conservative to want this. You may call it revolutionary to attempt to get it. But if that is conservative, I am conservative; if that is revolutionary, I am revolutionary—but too democratic to be evolutionary, anyhow.
¶The thing behind Bolshevism and many other modern things is a new doubt. It is not merely a doubt about God; it is rather specially a doubt about Man. The old morality, the Christian religion, the Catholic Church, differed from all this new mentality because it really believed in the rights of men. That is, it believed that ordinary men were clothed with powers and privileges and a kind of authority. Thus the ordinary man had a right to deal with dead matter, up to a given point; that is the right of property. Thus the ordinary man had a right to rule the other animals within reason; that is the objection to vegetarianism and many other things. The ordinary man had a right to judge about his own health, and what risks he would take with the ordinary things of his environment; that is the objection to Prohibition and many other things. The ordinary man had a right to judge of his children’s health, and generally to bring up children to the best of his ability; that is the objection to many interpretations of modern State education. Now in these primary things in which the old religion trusted a man, the new philosophy utterly distrusts a man. It insists that he must be a very rare sort of man to have any rights in these matters; and when he is the rare sort, he has the right to rule others even more than himself. It is this profound scepticism about the common man that is the common point in the most contradictory elements of modern thought. That is why Mr. Bernard Shaw wants to evolve a new animal that shall live longer and grow wiser than man. That is why Mr. Sidney Webb wants to herd the men that exist like sheep, or animals much more foolish than man. They are not rebelling against an abnormal tyranny; they are rebelling against what they think is a normal tyranny—the tyranny of the normal. They are not in revolt against the King. They are in revolt against the Citizen. The old revolutionist, when he stood on the roof (like the revolutionist in The Dynamiter) and looked over the city, used to say to himself, “Think how the princes and nobles revel in their palaces; think how the captains and cohorts ride the streets and trample on the people.” But the new revolutionist is not brooding on that. He is saying, “Think of all those stupid men in vulgar villas or ignorant slums. Think how badly they teach their children; think how they do the wrong thing to the dog and offend the feelings of the parrot.” In short, these sages, rightly or wrongly, cannot trust the normal man to rule in the home, and most certainly do not want him to rule in the State. They do not really want to give him any political power. They are willing to give him a vote, because they have long discovered that it need not give him any power. They are not willing to give him a house, or a wife, or a child, or a dog, or a cow, or a piece of land, because these things really do give him power.
¶Now we wish it to be understood that our policy is to give him power by giving him these things. We wish to insist that this is the real moral division underlying all our disputes, and perhaps the only one really worth disputing. We are far from denying, especially at this time, that there is much to be said on the other side. We alone, perhaps, are likely to insist in the full sense that the average respectable citizen ought to have something to rule. We alone, to the same extent and for the same reason, have the right to call ourselves democratic. A republic used to be called a nation of kings, and in our republic the kings really have kingdoms. All modern governments, Prussian or Russian, all modern movements, Capitalist or Socialist, are taking away that kingdom from the king. Because they dislike the independence of that kingdom, they are against property. Because they dislike the loyalty of that kingdom, they are against marriage.
¶It is therefore with a somewhat sad amusement that I note the soaring visions that accompany the sinking wages. I observe that the social prophets are still offering the homeless something much higher and purer than a home, and promising a supernormal superiority to people who are not allowed to be normal. I am quite content to dream of the old drudgery of democracy, by which as much as possible of a human life should be given to every human being; while the brilliant author of The First Men in the Moon will doubtless be soon deriding us in a romance called The Last Men on the Earth. And indeed I do believe that when they lose the pride of personal ownership they will lose something that belongs to their erect posture and to their footing and poise upon the planet. Meanwhile I sit amid droves of overdriven clerks and underpaid workmen in a tube or a tram; I read of the great conception of Men Like Gods and I wonder when men will be like men.