Written:
1883
First Published: 1887
Source: The
Unsocial Socialist, Chapter 5
Transcription: Steve Palmer
Markup:Steve Palmer
Proofread:Unknown
Copyleft: Internet
Archive(marxists.org) 2009. Permission
is
granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of
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Commons License.
Do you know what a pessimist is?"
"A man who thinks everybody as nasty as himself, and hates them for it."
"So, or thereabout. Modern English polite society, my native sphere,
seems to me as corrupt as consciousness of culture and absence of
honesty can make it. A canting, lie-loving, fact-hating, scribbling,
chattering, wealth-hunting, pleasure-hunting, celebrity-hunting mob,
that, having lost the fear of hell, and not replaced it by the love of
justice, cares for nothing but the lion's share of the wealth wrung by
threat of starvation from the hands of the classes that create it. If
you interrupt me with a silly speech, Hetty, I will pitch you into the
canal, and die of sorrow for my lost love afterwards. You know what I
am, according to the conventional description: a gentleman with lots of
money. Do you know the wicked origin of that money and gentility?"
"Oh, Sidney; have you been doing anything?"
"No, my best beloved; I am a gentleman, and have been doing nothing.
That a man can do so and not starve is nowadays not even a paradox.
Every halfpenny I possess is stolen money; but it has been stolen
legally, and, what is of some practical importance to you, I have no
means of restoring it to the rightful owners even if I felt inclined
to. Do you know what my father was?"
"What difference can that make now? Don't be disagreeable and full of
ridiculous fads, Sidney dear. I didn't marry your father."
"No; but you married - only incidentally, of course - my father's
fortune.
That necklace of yours was purchased with his money; and I can almost
fancy stains of blood."
"Stop, Sidney. I don't like this sort of romancing. It's all nonsense.
DO be nice to me."
"There are stains of sweat on it, I know."
"You nasty wretch!"
"I am thinking, not of you, my dainty one, but of the unfortunate
people who slave that we may live idly. Let me explain to you why we
are so rich. My father was a shrewd, energetic, and ambitious
Manchester man, who understood an exchange of any sort as a transaction
by which one man should lose and the other gain. He made it his object
to make as many exchanges as possible, and to be always the gaining
party in them. I do not know exactly what he was, for he was ashamed
both of his antecedents and of his relatives, from which I can only
infer that they were honest, and, therefore, unsuccessful people.
However, he acquired some knowledge of the cotton trade, saved some
money, borrowed some more on the security of his reputation for getting
the better of other people in business, and, as he accurately told me
afterwards, started FOR HIMSELF. He bought a factory and some raw
cotton. Now you must know that a man, by laboring some time on a piece
of raw cotton, can turn it into a piece of manufactured cotton fit for
making into sheets and shifts and the like. The manufactured cotton is
more valuable than the raw cotton, because the manufacture costs wear
and tear of machinery, wear and tear of the factory, rent of the ground
upon which the factory is built, and human labor, or wear and tear of
live men, which has to be made good by food, shelter, and rest. Do you
understand that?"
"We used to learn all about it at college. I don't see what it has to
do with us, since you are not in the cotton trade."
"You learned as much as it was thought safe to teach you, no doubt; but
not quite all, I should think. When my father started for himself,
there were many men in Manchester who were willing to labor in this
way, but they had no factory to work in, no machinery to work with, and
no raw cotton to work on, simply because all this indispensable plant,
and the materials for producing a fresh supply of it, had been
appropriated by earlier comers. So they found themselves with gaping
stomachs, shivering limbs, and hungry wives and children, in a place
called their own country, in which, nevertheless, every scrap of ground
and possible source of subsistence was tightly locked up in the hands
of others and guarded by armed soldiers and policemen. In this helpless
condition, the poor devils were ready to beg for access to a factory
and to raw cotton on any conditions compatible with life. My father
offered them the use of his factory, his machines, and his raw cotton
on the following conditions: They were to work long and hard, early and
late, to add fresh value to his raw cotton by manufacturing it. Out of
the value thus created by them, they were to recoup him for what he
supplied them with: rent, shelter, gas, water, machinery, raw
cotton - everything, and to pay him for his own services as
superintendent, manager, and salesman. So far he asked nothing but just
remuneration. But after this had been paid, a balance due solely to
their own labor remained. 'Out of this,' said my father, 'you shall
keep just enough to save you from starving, and of the rest you shall
make me a present to reward me for my virtue in saving money. Such is
the bargain I propose. It is, in my opinion, fair and calculated to
encourage thrifty habits. If it does not strike you in that light, you
can get a factory and raw cotton for yourselves; you shall not use
mine.' In other words, they might go to the devil and starve - Hobson's
choice! - for all the other factories were owned by men who offered no
better terms. The Manchesterians could not bear to starve or to see
their children starve, and so they accepted his terms and went into the
factory. The terms, you see, did not admit of their beginning to save
for themselves as he had done. Well, they created great wealth by their
labor, and lived on very little, so that the balance they gave for
nothing to my father was large. He bought more cotton, and more
machinery, and more factories with it; employed more men to make wealth
for him, and saw his fortune increase like a rolling snowball. He
prospered enormously, but the work men were no better off than at
first, and they dared not rebel and demand more of the money they had
made, for there were always plenty of starving wretches outside willing
to take their places on the old terms. Sometimes he met with a check,
as, for instance, when, in his eagerness to increase his store, he made
the men manufacture more cotton than the public needed; or when he
could not get enough of raw cotton, as happened during the Civil War in
America. Then he adapted himself to circumstances by turning away as
many workmen as he could not find customers or cotton for; and they, of
course, starved or subsisted on charity. During the war-time a big
subscription was got up for these poor wretches, and my father
subscribed one hundred pounds, in spite, he said, of his own great
losses. Then he bought new machines; and, as women and children could
work these as well as men, and were cheaper and more docile, he turned
away about seventy out of every hundred of his HANDS (so he called the
men), and replaced them by their wives and children, who made money for
him faster than ever. By this time he had long ago given up managing
the factories, and paid clever fellows who had no money of their own a
few hundreds a year to do it for him. He also purchased shares in other
concerns conducted on the same principle; pocketed dividends made in
countries which he had never visited by men whom he had never seen;
bought a seat in Parliament from a poor and corrupt constituency, and
helped to preserve the laws by which he had thriven. Afterwards, when
his wealth grew famous, he had less need to bribe; for modern men
worship the rich as gods, and will elect a man as one of their rulers
for no other reason than that he is a millionaire. He aped gentility,
lived in a palace at Kensington, and bought a part of Scotland to make
a deer forest of. It is easy enough to make a deer forest, as trees are
not necessary there. You simply drive off the peasants, destroy their
houses, and make a desert of the land. However, my father did not shoot
much himself; he generally let the forest out by the season to those
who did. He purchased a wife of gentle blood too, with the
unsatisfactory result now before you. That is how Jesse Trefusis, a
poor Manchester bagman, contrived to be come a plutocrat and gentleman
of landed estate. And also how I, who never did a stroke of work in my
life, am overburdened with wealth; whilst the children of the men who
made that wealth are slaving as their fathers slaved, or starving, or
in the workhouse, or on the streets, or the deuce knows where. What do
you think of that, my love?"
"What is the use of worrying about it, Sidney? It cannot be helped now.
Besides, if your father saved money, and the others were improvident,
he deserved to make a fortune."
"Granted; but he didn't make a fortune. He took a fortune that others
made. At Cambridge they taught me that his profits were the reward of
abstinence - the abstinence which enabled him to save. That quieted my
conscience until I began to wonder why one man should make another pay
him for exercising one of the virtues. Then came the question: what did
my father abstain from? The workmen abstained from meat, drink, fresh
air, good clothes, decent lodging, holidays, money, the society of
their families, and pretty nearly everything that makes life worth
living, which was perhaps the reason why they usually died twenty years
or so sooner than people in our circumstances. Yet no one rewarded them
for their abstinence. The reward came to my father, who abstained from
none of these things, but indulged in them all to his heart's content.
Besides, if the money was the reward of abstinence, it seemed logical
to infer that he must abstain ten times as much when he had fifty
thousand a year as when he had only five thousand. Here was a problem
for my young mind. Required, something from which my father abstained
and in which his workmen exceeded, and which he abstained from more and
more as he grew richer and richer. The only thing that answered this
description was hard work, and as I never met a sane man willing to pay
another for idling, I began to see that these prodigious payments to my
father were extorted by force. To do him justice, he never boasted of
abstinence. He considered himself a hard-worked man, and claimed his
fortune as the reward of his risks, his calculations, his anxieties,
and the journeys he had to make at all seasons and at all hours. This
comforted me somewhat until it occurred to me that if he had lived a
century earlier, invested his money in a horse and a pair of pistols,
and taken to the road, his object - that of wresting from others the
fruits of their labor without rendering them an equivalent - would have
been exactly the same, and his risk far greater, for it would have
included risk of the gallows. Constant travelling with the constable at
his heels, and calculations of the chances of robbing the Dover mail,
would have given him his fill of activity and anxiety. On the whole, if
Jesse Trefusis, M.P., who died a millionaire in his palace at
Kensington, had been a highwayman, I could not more heartily loathe the
social arrangements that rendered such a career as his not only
possible, but eminently creditable to himself in the eyes of his
fellows. Most men make it their business to imitate him, hoping to
become rich and idle on the same terms. Therefore I turn my back on
them. I cannot sit at their feasts knowing how much they cost in human
misery, and seeing how little they produce of human happiness. What is
your opinion, my treasure?"
Henrietta seemed a little troubled. She smiled faintly, and said
caressingly, "It was not your fault, Sidney. I don't blame you."
"Immortal powers!" he exclaimed, sitting bolt upright and appealing to
the skies, "here is a woman who believes that the only concern all this
causes me is whether she thinks any the worse of me personally on
account of it!"
"No, no, Sidney. It is not I alone. Nobody thinks the worse of you for
it."
"Quite so," he returned, in a polite frenzy. "Nobody sees any harm in
it. That is precisely the mischief of it."
"Besides," she urged, "your mother belonged to one of the oldest
families in England."
"And what more can man desire than wealth with descent from a county
family! Could a man be happier than I ought to be, sprung as I am from
monopolists of all the sources and instruments of production - of land
on
the one side, and of machinery on the other? This very ground on which
we are resting was the property of my mother's father. At least the law
allowed him to use it as such. When he was a boy, there was a fairly
prosperous race of peasants settled here, tilling the soil, paying him
rent for permission to do so, and making enough out of it to satisfy
his large wants and their own narrow needs without working themselves
to death. But my grandfather was a shrewd man. He perceived that cows
and sheep produced more money by their meat and wool than peasants by
their husbandry. So he cleared the estate. That is, he drove the
peasants from their homes, as my father did afterwards in his Scotch
deer forest. Or, as his tombstone has it, he developed the resources of
his country. I don't know what became of the peasants; HE didn't know,
and, I presume, didn't care. I suppose the old ones went into the
workhouse, and the young ones crowded the towns, and worked for men
like my father in factories. Their places were taken by cattle, which
paid for their food so well that my grandfather, getting my father to
take shares in the enterprise, hired laborers on the Manchester terms
to cut that canal for him. When it was made, he took toll upon it; and
his heirs still take toll, and the sons of the navvies who dug it and
of the engineer who designed it pay the toll when they have occasion to
travel by it, or to purchase goods which have been conveyed along it. I
remember my grandfather well. He was a well-bred man, and a perfect
gentleman in his manners; but, on the whole, I think he was wickeder
than my father, who, after all, was caught in the wheels of a vicious
system, and had either to spoil others or be spoiled by them. But my
grandfather - the old rascal! - was in no such dilemma. Master as he
was of
his bit of merry England, no man could have enslaved him, and he might
at least have lived and let live. My father followed his example in the
matter of the deer forest, but that was the climax of his wickedness,
whereas it was only the beginning of my grandfather's. Howbeit,
whichever bears the palm, there they were, the types after which we all
strive."
"Not all, Sidney. Not we two. I hate tradespeople and country squires.
We belong to the artistic and cultured classes, and we can keep aloof
from shopkeepers."
"Living, meanwhile, at the rate of several thousand a year on rent and
interest. No, my dear, this is the way of those people who insist that
when they are in heaven they shall be spared the recollection of such a
place as hell, but are quite content that it shall exist outside their
consciousness. I respect my father more - I mean I despise him
less - for
doing his own sweating and filching than I do the sensitive sluggards
and cowards who lent him their money to sweat and filch with, and asked
no questions provided the interest was paid punctually. And as to your
friends the artists, they are the worst of all."
"Oh, Sidney, you are determined not to be pleased. Artists don't keep
factories."
"No; but the factory is only a part of the machinery of the system. Its
basis is the tyranny of brain force, which, among civilized men, is
allowed to do what muscular force does among schoolboys and savages.
The schoolboy proposition is: 'I am stronger than you, therefore you
shall fag for me.' Its grown up form is: 'I am cleverer than you,
therefore you shall fag for me.' The state of things we produce by
submitting to this, bad enough even at first, becomes intolerable when
the mediocre or foolish descendants of the clever fellows claim to have
inherited their privileges. Now, no men are greater sticklers for the
arbitrary dominion of genius and talent than your artists. The great
painter is not satisfied with being sought after and admired because
his hands can do more than ordinary hands, which they truly can, but he
wants to be fed as if his stomach needed more food than ordinary
stomachs, which it does not. A day's work is a day's work, neither more
nor less, and the man who does it needs a day's sustenance, a night's
repose, and due leisure, whether he be painter or ploughman. But the
rascal of a painter, poet, novelist, or other voluptuary in labor, is
not content with his advantage in popular esteem over the ploughman; he
also wants an advantage in money, as if there were more hours in a day
spent in the studio or library than in the field; or as if he needed
more food to enable him to do his work than the ploughman to enable him
to do his. He talks of the higher quality of his work, as if the higher
quality of it were of his own making - as if it gave him a right to
work
less for his neighbor than his neighbor works for him - as if the
ploughman could not do better without him than he without the
ploughman - as if the value of the most celebrated pictures has not
been
questioned more than that of any straight furrow in the arable
world - as
if it did not take an apprenticeship of as many years to train the hand
and eye of a mason or blacksmith as of an artist - as if, in short, the
fellow were a god, as canting brain worshippers have for years past
been assuring him he is. Artists are the high priests of the modern
Moloch. Nine out of ten of them are diseased creatures, just sane
enough to trade on their own neuroses. The only quality of theirs which
extorts my respect is a certain sublime selfishness which makes them
willing to starve and to let their families starve sooner than do any
work they don't like."
"INDEED you are quite wrong, Sidney. There was a girl at the Slade
school who supported her mother and two sisters by her drawing.
Besides, what can you do? People were made so."
"Yes; I was made a landlord and capitalist by the folly of the people;
but they can unmake me if they will. Meanwhile I have absolutely no
means of escape from my position except by giving away my slaves to
fellows who will use them no better than I, and becoming a slave
myself; which, if you please, you shall not catch me doing in a hurry.
No, my beloved, I must keep my foot on their necks for your sake as
well as for my own. But you do not care about all this prosy stuff. I
am consumed with remorse for having bored my darling. You want to know
why I am living here like a hermit in a vulgar two-roomed hovel instead
of tasting the delights of London society with my beautiful and devoted
young wife."
"But you don't intend to stay here, Sidney?"
"Yes, I do; and I will tell you why. I am helping to liberate those
Manchester laborers who were my father's slaves. To bring that about,
their fellow slaves all over the world must unite in a vast
international association of men pledged to share the world's work
justly; to share the produce of the work justly; to yield not a
farthing - charity apart - to any full-grown and able-bodied idler or
malingerer, and to treat as vermin in the commonwealth persons
attempting to get more than their share of wealth or give less than
their share of work. This is a very difficult thing to accomplish,
because working-men, like the people called their betters, do not
always understand their own interests, and will often actually help
their oppressors to exterminate their saviours to the tune of 'Rule
Britannia,' or some such lying doggerel. We must educate them out of
that, and, meanwhile, push forward the international association of
laborers diligently. I am at present occupied in propagating its
principles. Capitalism, organized for repressive purposes under pretext
of governing the nation, would very soon stop the association if it
understood our aim, but it thinks that we are engaged in gunpowder
plots and conspiracies to assassinate crowned heads; and so, whilst the
police are blundering in search of evidence of these, our real work
goes on unmolested. Whether I am really advancing the cause is more
than I can say. I use heaps of postage stamps, pay the expenses of many
indifferent lecturers, defray the cost of printing reams of pamphlets
and hand-bills which hail the laborer flatteringly as the salt of the
earth, write and edit a little socialist journal, and do what lies in
my power generally. I had rather spend my ill-gotten wealth in this way
than upon an expensive house and a retinue of servants. And I prefer my
corduroys and my two-roomed chalet here to our pretty little house, and
your pretty little ways, and my pretty little neglect of the work that
my heart is set upon. Some day, perhaps, I will take a holiday; and
then we shall have a new honeymoon."