Part 24

The outlook then from the point of view of this paper is a political one--one in which we should expect to see the world political gradually becoming a reflex of the world economic. That political should be slow in coming into line with economic facts is only in accordance with all that the past history of our country has to teach us. For years and decades the squirearchy retained an influence in the House of Commons out of all proportion to its potency as an economic force; and even at this moment the “landed interest” bears a much larger part in law-making than that to which its real importance entitles it. Therefore we must be neither surprised nor dispirited if, in a cold-blooded envisagement of the condition of English parties, the truth is borne in upon us that the pace of political progress has no proper relation to the rate at which we are travelling towards Socialism in the spheres of thought and industry.

This fact is probably--nay almost certainly--very much more patent to the Socialist and the political student than to the man in the street, or even to him of the first class railway carriage. The noisy jubilation of the Radical press over the victory of a Home Ruler at a bye-election, at a brief and vague reference to the “homes of the people” in a two hours’ speech from a Liberal leader, or at the insertion of a “social” plank in a new annual programme, is well and cleverly calculated to beguile the ardent Democrat, and strike cold terror to the heart of the timorous Tory. But a perfectly impartial analysis of the present state of parties will convince the most sanguine that the breath of the great economic changes dealt with in Mr. Clarke’s paper has as yet scarcely ruffled the surface of the House of Commons.

When the syllabus of this course of lectures was drawn up, those who were responsible for it suggested as the first subheading of this paper, the well worn phrase, “The disappearance of the Whig.” It is a happy expression, and one from the contemplation of which much comfort may be derived by an optimistic and unanalytical temperament. Printed are at this disadvantage compared with spoken words, they fail to convey the nicer _nuances_ of meaning bestowed by tone and emphasis; and thus the word “disappearance” meets the eye, carrying with it no slightest suggestion of irony. Yet the phrase is pointless, if not “meant surcarstic”; for so far is the Whig from “disappearing,” that he is the greatest political fact of the day. To persons deafened by the daily democratic shouting of the Radical newspapers this assertion may require some confirmation and support. Let us look at the facts then. The first thing which strikes us in connexion with the present Parliament is that it no longer consists of two distinct parties, _i.e._, of two bodies of men differentiated from each other by the holding of _fundamentally_ different principles. Home Rule left out,[97] there remains no reason whatever, except the quite minor question of Disestablishment, why even the simulacrum of party organisation should be maintained, or why the structural arrangements of the House of Commons should not be so altered as to resemble those of a town hall, in which all the seats face the chair.

But fifty years ago the floor of the House was a frontier of genuine significance; and the titles “Whig” and “Tory” were word-symbols of real inward and spiritual facts. The Tory party was mostly made up of men who were conscientiously opposed to popular representation, and prepared to stand or fall by their opposition. They held, as a living political creed, that the government of men was the eternal heritage of the rich, and especially of those whose riches spelt rent. The Whigs, on the other hand, believed, or said they believed, in the aphorism “_Vox populi, vox Dei_”; and they, on the whole, consistently advocated measures designed to give that voice a distincter and louder utterance. Here, then, was one of those fundamental differences in the absence of which party nomenclature is a sham. But there was another. In the first half of this century the Tories, hidebound in historic traditions and deaf to the knell of the old _régime_ tolling in the thud, thud, of the piston rods of the new steam engines, clung pathetically to the old idea of the functions of the State and to territorial rights. The Whigs went for _laisser faire_ and the consequent supremacy of the business man. I am making a perfectly provable proposition when I say that all the political disputes[98] which arose between the Revolution of 1688 and the enfranchisement of the £10 householder by Disraeli had their common cause in one of these two root differences. But the battle has long ago been lost and won. The Whigs have triumphed all along the line. The Tories have not only been beaten, they have been absorbed. A process has gone on like that described by Macaulay as following on the Norman invasion, when men gradually ceased to call themselves Saxon and Norman and proudly boasted of being English. The difference in the case before us is that while the Tories have accepted the whole of the Whig principles they still abjure the Whig name.

No so-called Conservative to-day will venture on opposing an extension of the franchise on the plain ground of principle. At most he will but temporise and plead for delay. No blush of conscious inconsistency suffused Mr. Ritchie’s swarthy features when introducing his “frankly democratic” Local Government Bill. And rightly not; for he was doing no violence to party principles.

In the matter of the functions of the State, the absorption of the Tory is not quite so obvious, because there never has been, and, as long as society lasts, never can be, a _parti serieux_ of logical _laisser faire_. Even in the thick of the Industrial Revolution, the difference between the two great parties was mainly one of tendency--of attitude of mind. The Tory had a certain affection for the State--a natural self-love: the Whig distrusted it. This distrust is now the sentiment of the whole of our public men. They see, some of them perhaps more clearly than others, that there is much the State must do; but they all wish that much to be as little as possible. Even when, driven by an irresistible force which they feel but do not understand (which none but the Socialist does or can understand), they bring forward measures for increasing the power of the whole over the part, their arguments are always suffused in a sickly halo of apology: their gestures are always those of timorous deprecation and fretful diffidence. They are always nervously anxious to explain that the proposal violates no principle of political economy, and with them political economy means, not Professor Sidgwick, but Adam Smith.

The reason why this unanimity of all prominent politicians on great fundamental principles is not manifest to the mind of the average man is that, although there is nothing left to get hot or even moderately warm about, the political temperature is as high as ever. It is not in the dust of the arena, but only in the repose of the auditorium that one is able to realise that men will fight as fiercely and clapper-claw each other as spitefully over a dry bone as over a living principle. One has to stand aside awhile to see that politicians are like the theological controversialists of whom Professor Seeley somewhere says that they never get so angry with each other as when their differences are almost imperceptible, except perhaps when they are quite so.

Both the efficient and the final cause of this unanimity is a sort of unconscious or semi-conscious recognition of the fact that the word “State” has taken to itself new and diverse connotations, that the State idea has changed its content. Whatever State control may have meant fifty years ago it never meant hostility to private property as such. Now, for us, and for as far ahead as we can see, it means that and little else. So long as the State interfered with the private property and powers of one set of proprietors with a view only to increasing those of another, the existence of parties for and against such interference was a necessity of the case. A duty on foreign corn meant the keeping up of incomes drawn from rent:[99] its abolition meant a rise of manufacturers’ profits. “Free Trade” swelled the purses of the new _bourgeoisie_: the Factory Acts depleted them, and gave a sweet revenge to the rent-docked squire. But of this manipulation of the legislative machine for proprietors’ purposes we are at, or at least in sight of, the end. The State has grown bigger by an immense aggregation of units, who were once to all intents and purposes separate from it; and now its action generally points not to a readjustment of private property and privileges as between class and class, but to their complete disappearance. So then the instinct which is welding together the propertied politicians is truly self-preservative.

But, it may be asked by the bewildered Radical, by the tremulous Conservative, by the optimistic Socialist, if the political leaders are really opposed to State augmentation, how comes it that every new measure of reform introduced into the House of Commons is more or less colored with Socialism, and that no popular speaker will venture to address a public meeting without making some reference of a socialistic sort to the social problem? Why, for instance, does that extremely well oiled and accurately poised political weathercock, Sir William Harcourt, pointing to the dawn, crow out that “we are all Socialists now”?

To these questions (and I have not invented them) I answer: in the first place because the opposition of the political leaders _is_ instinctive, and only, as yet, semi-conscious, even in the most hypocritical; in the second place, that a good deal of the legislative Socialism appears more in words than in deeds; in the third place that the famous flourish of Sir William Harcourt was a rhetorical falsehood; and fourthly, because, fortunately for the progress of mankind, self-preservative instincts are not peculiar to the propertied classes.

For it is largely instinctive and wholly self preservative, this change in the position of the working people towards the State, this change by which, from fearing it as an actual enemy, they have come to look to it as a potential savior. I know that this assertion will be violently denied by many of my Socialist brethren. The fly on the wheel, not unnaturally, feels wounded at being told that he is, after all, not the motive power; and the igniferous orators of the Socialist party are welcome, so far as I am concerned, to all the comfort they can get from imagining that they, and not any great, blind, evolutionary forces are the dynamic of the social revolution. Besides, the metaphor of the fly really does not run on all fours (I forget, for the moment, how many legs a fly has); for the Socialist does at least know in what direction the car is going, even though he is not the driving force. Yet it seems to me the part being, and to be, played by the Socialist, is notable enough in all conscience; for it is he who is turning instinct into self-conscious reason; voicing a dumb demand; and giving intelligent direction to a thought wave of terrific potency.

There is a true cleavage being slowly driven through the body politic; but the wedge is still beneath the surface. The signs of its workings are to be found in the reactionary measures of pseudo reform advocated by many prominent politicians; in the really Socialist proposals of some of the obscurer men; in the growing distaste of the political club man for a purely political pabulum; and in the receptive attitude of a certain portion of the cultivated middle class towards the outpourings of the Fabian Society.

This conscious recognition of the meaning of modern tendencies, this defining of the new line of cleavage, while it is the well-spring of most of the Socialist hopes, is no less the source of some lively fear. At present it is only the acuter and more far seeing of the minds amongst the propertied classes who are at all alive to the real nature of the attack. One has but to listen to the chatter of the average Liberal candidate, to note how hopelessly blind the man is to the fact that the existence of private property in the means of production, forms any factor at all in the social problem; and what is true of the rank and file is true only in a less degree of the chiefs themselves. Ignorance of economics and inability to shake their minds free of eighteenth century political philosophy,[100] at present hinders the leaders of the “party of progress” from taking up a definite position either for or against the advance of the new ideas. The number of English statesmen, who, like Prince Bismarck, see in Socialism a swelling tide whose oceanic rush must be broken by timely legislative breakwaters, is still only to be expressed by a minus quantity. But this political myopia is not destined to endure. Every additional vote cast for avowed Socialist candidates at municipal and other elections, will help to bring home to the minds of the Liberals, that the section of the new democracy which regards the ballot merely as a war-engine with which to attack capitalism, is a growing one. At last our Liberal will be face to face with a logical but irritating choice. Either to throw over private capital or to frankly acknowledge that it is a distinction without a difference which separates him from the Conservatives, against whom he has for years been fulminating.

At first sight it looks as though this political moment in the history of the Liberal party would be one eminently auspicious for the Socialist cause. But although I have a lively faith in the victory of logic in the long run, I have an equally vivid knowledge that to assure the triumph the run must be a very long one; and above all I have a profound respect for the staying powers of politicians, and their ability to play a waiting game. It is one thing to offer a statesman the choice of one of two logical courses: it is another to prevent his seeing a third, and an illogical one, and going for it. Such prevention in the present case will be so difficult as to be well nigh impossible; for the Liberal hand still holds a strong suit--the cards political.

It is quite certain that the social programme of our party will become a great fact long before all the purely political proposals of the Liberals have received the Royal assent; and the game of the politician will be to hinder the adoption of the former by noisily hustling forward the latter. Unfortunately for us it will be an easy enough game to play. The scent of the non-Socialist politician for political red herrings is keen, and his appetite for political Dead Sea fruit prodigious. The number of “blessed words,” the mere sound of which carries content to his soul, would fill a whole page. In an age of self-seeking his pathetic self-abnegation would be refreshing were it not so desperately silly. The young artizan on five-and-twenty shillings a week, who with his wife and children occupies two rooms in “a model,” and who is about as likely to become a Lama as a leaseholder, will shout himself hoarse over Leaseholds’ Enfranchisement, and sweat great drops of indignation at the plunder of rich West End tradesmen by rich West End landlords. The “out of work,” whose last shirt is in pawn, will risk his skull’s integrity in Trafalgar Square in defence of Mr. O’Brien’s claim to dress in gaol like a gentleman.

Of course all this is very touching: indeed, to be quite serious, it indicates a nobility of character and breadth of human sympathy in which lies our hope of social salvation. But its infinite potentiality must not blind us to the fact that in its actuality the dodgy Liberal will see his chance of the indefinite postponement of the socialising of politics. Manhood suffrage, female suffrage, the woes of deceased wives’ sisters, the social ambition of dissenting ministers, the legal obstacles to the “free” acquirement of landed property, home rule for “dear old Scotland” and “neglected little Wales,” extraordinary tithes, reform of the House of Lords: all these and any number of other obstacles may be successfully thrown in the way of the forward march of the Socialist army. And the worst of it all is that in a great part of his obstructive tactics the Liberal will have us on the hip; for to out-and-out democratisation we are fully pledged, and must needs back up any attack on hereditary or class privilege, come it from what quarter it may.

But, to get back to our metaphor of the card table (a metaphor much more applicable to the games of political men), the political suit does not exhaust the Liberal hand. There still remains a card to play--a veritable trump. Sham Socialism is the name of it, and Mr. John Morley the man to plank it down.

I have said above that the trend of things to Socialism is best shewn by the changed attitude of men towards State interference and control; and this is true. Still it must not be forgotten that although Socialism involves State control, State control does not imply Socialism--at least in any modern meaning of the term. It is not so much to the thing the State does, as to the end for which it does it that we must look before we can decide whether it is a Socialist State or not. Socialism is the common holding of the means of production and exchange, and _the holding of them for the equal benefit of all_. In view of the tone now being adopted by some of us[101] I cannot too strongly insist upon the importance of this distinction; for the losing sight of it by friends, and its intentional obscuration by enemies, constitute a big and immediate danger. To bring forward sixpenny telegrams as an instance of State Socialism may be a very good method of scoring a point off an individualist opponent in a debate before a middle-class audience; but from the standpoint of the proletariat a piece of State management which spares the pockets only of the commercial and leisured classes is no more Socialism than were the _droits de Seigneur_ of the middle ages. Yet this is the sort of sham Socialism which it is as certain as death will be doled out by the popular party in the hope that mere State action will be mistaken for really Socialist legislation. And the object of these givers of Greek gifts will most infallibly be attained if those Socialists who know what they want hesitate (from fear of losing popularity, or from any more amiable weakness) to clamor their loudest against any and every proposal whose adoption would prolong the life of private capital a single hour.

But leaving sham Socialism altogether out of account, there are other planks in the Liberal “and Radical” programme which would make stubborn barriers in the paths of the destroyers of private capital. Should, for instance, Church disestablishment come upon us while the _personnel_ of the House of Commons is at all like what it is at present, few things are more certain than that a good deal of what is now essentially collective property will pass into private hands; that the number of individuals interested in upholding ownership will be increased; and that the only feelings gratified will be the acquisitiveness of these persons and the envy of Little Bethel.

Again, the general state of mind of the Radical on the land question is hardly such as to make a Socialist hilarious. It is true your “progressive” will cheer Henry George, and is sympathetically inclined to nationalisation (itself a “blessed word”); but he is not at all sure that nationalisation, free land, and peasant proprietorship, are not three names for one and the same proposal. And, so far as the effective members of the Liberal party are concerned, there is no question at all that the second and third of these “solutions” find much more favor than the first. In fact, in this matter of the land, the method of dealing with which is of the very propædeutics of Socialism, the Radical who goes for “free sale” or for peasant ownership, is a less potent revolutionary force than the Tory himself; for this latter only seeks to maintain in land the state of things which the Ring and Trust maker is working to bring about in capital[102]--and on the part which _he_ is playing in economic evolution we are all agreed.

From such dangers as these the progress of Democracy is, by itself, powerless to save us; for although always and everywhere Democracy holds Socialism in its womb, the birth may be indefinitely delayed by stupidity on one side and acuteness on the other.

I have gone at some length into an analysis of the possible artificial hindrances to Socialism, because, owing to the amiability and politeness shown us by the Radical left wing during the last twelve months; to the successes which Radical votes have given to some of our candidates at School Board and other elections; and to the friendly patronage bestowed upon us by certain “advanced” journals, some of our brightest, and otherwise most clear-sighted, spirits have begun to base high hopes upon what they call “the permeation” of the Liberal party. These of our brothers have a way of telling us that the transition to Socialism will be so gradual as to be imperceptible, and that there will never come a day when we shall be able to say “now we have a Socialist State.” They are fond of likening the simpler among us who disagree with them as to the extreme protraction of the process, to children who having been told that when it rains a cloud falls, looks disappointedly out of the window on a wet day, unconscious that the cloud is falling before their eyes in the shape of drops of water. To these cautious souls I reply that although there is much truth in their contention that the process will be gradual, we shall be able to say that we have a Socialist State on the day on which no man or group of men holds, over the means of production, property rights by which the labor of the producers can be subjected to exploitation; and that while their picturesque metaphor is a happy as well as a poetic conceit, it depends upon the political acumen of the present and next generation of Socialist men whether the “cloud” shall fall in refreshing Socialist showers or in a dreary drizzle of Radicalism, bringing with it more smuts than water, fouling everything and cleansing nowhere.

This permeation of the Radical Left, undoubted fact though it is of present day politics, is worth a little further attention; for there are two possible and tenable views as to its final outcome. One is that it will end in the slow absorption of the Socialist in the Liberal party, and that by the action of this sponge-like organism, the whole of the Rent and Interest will pass into collective control, without there ever having been a party definitely and openly pledged to that end. According to this theory there will come a time, and that shortly, when the avowed Socialists and the much socialised Radicals will be strong enough to hold the balance in many constituencies, and sufficiently powerful in all to drive the advanced candidate many pegs further than his own inclination would take him. Then, either by abstention or by actual support of the reactionary champion at elections, they will be able to threaten the Liberals with certain defeat. The Liberals, being traditionally squeezable folk (like all absorbent bodies), will thus be forced to make concessions and to offer compromises; and will either adopt a certain minimum number of the Socialis_tic_ proposals, or allow to Socialists a share in the representation itself. Such concessions and compromises will grow in number and importance with each successive appeal to the electorate, until at last the game is won.