r 
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 SOCIALISM AND POLI- 
 TICS: A STUDY IN THE 
 READJUSTMENT OF 
 THE VALUES OF LIFE.
 
 HK 
 550 
 
 SOCIALISM & POLITICS: A STUDY IN 
 THE READJUSTMENT OF THE VALUES 
 OF LIFE. 
 
 N the eve of the great Elec- 
 tion of 1 906 I was asked to 
 speak before a university- 
 audience upon Socialism 
 and Politics; & as I thought 
 over my subject there some- 
 how came to me, & I could 
 not get outof my mindjthe 
 dialogue of Charmides & 
 the tale Socrates tells of the cure of Zamolxis. It 
 seemed to have no direct bearing upon what I 
 wanted to say, and yet it had every bearing. For 
 whether we hold, as some materialists may, that 
 the cure of Zamolxis is but a patent medicine, or 
 whether we look with Plato for an inner meaning 
 in the fable and think that there is some charm 
 with which the soul must first be cured before the 
 body gets its chance, one lesson in the dialogue at 
 least is certain. We must, before anything is done, 
 try to arrive at the meaning of the terms we use, 
 just as they did in the Palaestra of Taureas so long 
 ago, when as in our own day everything came up 
 for re-definition. 
 
 What then is Socialism ? The word is much ban- 
 died about, but I have never seen any satisfactory 
 definition of it, and perhaps it may be said that 
 we have not evolved yet into the need for correct 
 definition. 
 
 a 2 T, 
 
 110589?
 
 The defini- Twenty years ago, when I was an undergraduate at 
 tion of Value Cambridge, I remember in our inter-collegiate ex- 
 aminations for the history schools one of the ques- 
 tions set us was the defin ition of "value" & "riches." 
 I had my papers torn up and my marks cancelled 
 for the reply given. " Value," I said, preaching John 
 Ruskin to my examiner, signified "the strength or 
 availing of anything towards the sustaining of life; 
 it was two-fold, first intrinsic and then effectual." 
 This definition,now very commonly held,proceeds, 
 as all know, to distinguish in detail and with illus- 
 trations the two different kinds of value and their 
 significance to the community. 
 Now I have never been able to see that I was other 
 than right in quoting from " Munera Pulveris" & 
 " Unto This Last," and I still hold that the recon- 
 sideration of value there involved is the touchstone 
 of our social question. By it alone reorganisation is 
 possible ; by it all standards have to be readjusted. 
 The defini- t@kFollowing the Socratic precedent, therefore, let 
 tion of So- us first define what we mean by Socialism, a word to 
 cialism which people attach now the vaguest, now the 
 
 most limited significance. When we have found our 
 definition we can consider its application to poli- 
 tics. This then is the definition I offer: 
 
 Socialism is a faith whose objective is the betterment of 
 society^ which objective it is sought to arrive at through 
 a more equitable distribution^ based upon a more collec- 
 tive production^ of wealthy and the sanction for which 
 rests upon scientific^ historic^ and ethical principles. 
 
 It will be observed that I have included within my 
 4
 
 definition more than just those economic consider- 
 ations which usually challenge our attention when 
 we deal with this question of Socialism, or seek to 
 answer it. My reasons for doing so I shall try to 
 explain in the sequel: suffice it here that I find 
 myself unable to limit the term, as so many of my 
 Socialist friends appear to do, solely to the needs of 
 society in relation to the instruments of production. 
 To me these gentlemen appear to be dealing with 
 the economic aspects of Socialism alone, thus leav- 
 ing all the other, perhaps greater, things in life and 
 in the State to take care of themselves, a sort of 
 " Devil take the hindmost" in the race of ideas. 
 I have so framed my definition, therefore, as to win 
 the sympathies of all those who are not at present 
 able to give their unreserved support to any dog- 
 matic belief, all those to whom Socialism is their 
 religion, all those who are willing to work in the 
 same direction with their more orthodox brethren, 
 even though to the latter the road to the new State 
 may have a different bearing. 
 If, suggests Mr. Bernard Shaw in one of his most 
 brilliant plays, your religion is worn out, scrap it 
 and get another ; if your social system is worn out, 
 scrap it and get another; and the implication is 
 that we may not have the pluck to do this. Perhaps 
 not; let us at least insist upon the certainty of our 
 premises before we try political conclusions. 
 But is our social systemworn out? The Revolution- Revolution- 
 ary Socialist says yes ; the Constructive Socialist ary & Con- 
 may be permitted to give another answer. He trims ; structive So- 
 he asks for readjustment; he asks for time; also he cialism 
 
 5
 
 goes to work, or he should to my thinking, by the 
 process of historical induction. He does not, look- 
 ing at the social organism, wish to 
 
 "... shatter it to bits, and then 
 Remould it nearer to the hearts desire": 
 
 hewishes to take what is best & noblest in national 
 character, national ability, and national manners 
 towards the shaping of his new State. 
 If, in addition to being a Socialist, he is also an 
 Englishman — I wish there were a name^sufficiently 
 comprehensive to embrace all the English-speak- 
 ing peoples: the American, the Celt, the Colonial, 
 they are all within the ring — if he be also an Eng- 
 lishman, he will have an instinct for compromise, 
 that most unreasonable way of attaining his most 
 reasonable objective. 
 
 If, in addition to this, he be also a student of the 
 history of his country and his race, he will consider 
 how inevitable is the position at which he has ar- 
 rived, even though he may not like it, nor like to 
 admit it, and he will have the utmost reverence for 
 many old traditions. Further still, he will see how 
 inevitable is the pendulum swing from individual- 
 ism to collectivism and back again. He will recall 
 the charters of the medieval guilds, and the burn- 
 ing words of the prophet Blake in the day of the 
 tearing up of those charters : 
 
 "I wander through each chartered street. 
 Near where the chartered Thames does flow, 
 And mark in every face I meet 
 Marks of weakness, marks of woe." 
 6
 
 If our Socialist, in addition to his study of history, 
 be likewise an artist or a craftsman, he will realise 
 also some little of that beauty of the past at which 
 he is again striving to arrive, and he will reverence 
 the past accordingly. As an artist he will know two 
 things: first that no individualism is so sincere as 
 that of the artist, for his whole power of creation 
 depends upon his freedom to create; secondly that 
 in our own day the artist, I do not mean the picture 
 painter, is so handicapped by social conditions and 
 environment that he is debarred from the free ex- 
 ercise of his creation. Talking over these matters a 
 short while since with one of the choicest spirits, 
 one of the finest craftsmen of our time, who was 
 mourning with me over the financial ruin of his 
 workshops, he said: " 'Tis no good; they won't let 
 me go on with my work, I must give it up; the ar- 
 tist is not allowed to succeed in these days — success 
 is only possible to the people who sit still and 
 pounce." Indeed, success to the artist is not meas- 
 ured by his wage, but by the excellence of his pro- 
 duction ; & thus it comes that so many of the plastic 
 artists in our time call themselves Socialists and are 
 at war with society: they want more chance, more 
 leisure, more scope. Will they get it in the Collec- 
 tivist State ? Very likely not. The artist is for the 
 most part a light-hearted, simple-minded man: he 
 does not think out systems very far; and he is con- 
 tent to leave the play of politics to others. Give him 
 to choose his stick from the heap in the city of 
 Kouroo, and he will work along without reference 
 to anyone; but we have to remember always that 
 
 7
 
 when the cities and the dynasties are passed away, 
 it is his work only that is eternal, and that yields the 
 measure of their greatness. There are those who 
 think, and I know Socialists who hold this view, 
 that the realisation of a Collectivist State will mean 
 the final extinction of the arts.This may or may not 
 be so, but if it be so, the extinction of the Collecti- 
 vist State will follow hard upon it. 
 Well and wonderfully has it been said how that 
 State is impossible of continuance where the majo- 
 rity of the citizens are permanently excluded from 
 participation in the arts, letters, and nobler things 
 of life. We in England seem to be shaping towards 
 the proof of the impossibility; and we are restless. 
 And why is there this unrest, this desire for change, 
 this dreaming for Utopias, for the great City, the 
 nobler State, among the people? I think it is the 
 human spirit that is rebelling, that will not stand 
 the conditions of modern life. In a variety of ways 
 does the search for beauty, for harmony in life, 
 reveal itself. In the doctrinaire schemes of refor- 
 mers, in the rebellion of artists against ugliness, in 
 the determination of the artisan to fight the wage 
 slavery of industrialism. 
 The Non- As industry grows more concentrated, more com- 
 Folitical plex, more subdivided, so the average producer 
 Socialism grows less equipped, his character less formed. The 
 desire for the abstract harmony gathers force in in- 
 verse ratio to its realisation. And so far do we dis- 
 tance our ideals of character and production, so 
 quickly do we travel here in actual life along the 
 path of the abstract harmony, that at times we ask 
 8
 
 ourselves: May It not all be illusion? Is it perhaps 
 true after all that Democracy, or that form of 
 "government of the people, for the people, by the 
 people," as Lincoln phrased it, the form in which 
 we were taught to believe, is but a myth, sloughed 
 off with the old-world Liberalism, and that a new 
 order is in making, an order of financial power, 
 whereby directive capitalism shall be at the top of 
 our State, and underlying it, the millions of units 
 developed not "in harmony," an order in which the 
 Platonic state is not considered. Some people hold 
 this view,especially in America,where I have heard 
 it boldly and cynically set forth — it is the " Under- 
 shaft" view. For my part I cannot accept it ; I do 
 not believe in the possibility of its continuance; 6c 
 I am led to this conviction because of the intense 
 earnestness of the many hundreds of thoughtful 
 men I have met (always in great cities) who hold 
 in one shape or other what I have defined as the 
 Socialistic Faith. To these men Socialism is not a 
 political force merely. There is in it the quality of 
 religion; it means to them the freeing of the human 
 spirit. 
 
 As students of history, we recall thewhite and grey 
 friars of S. Francis, the Lollards of Wykliffe, the 
 Ironsides of Cromwell: we know how much these 
 meant as political forces; we know too that what 
 they effected politically was as nothing to their in- 
 fluence upon the mind of the race. And here, whe- 
 ther for right or wrong, the thing is happening 
 again before our eyes. Do we not every day observe 
 Socialism — the non-political — making its way? 
 
 9
 
 Indeed that and not the poHtlcal Socialism is the 
 real corrosive force in the commonwealth, theforce 
 that is changing all the values. Christian ethics 
 have once again been tossed from the cup of doc- 
 trine, and are flowing through the veins of national 
 life. "Ah, yes," the inductive historian may say, " & 
 like the other movements, it will perhaps do some 
 fraction of the work it sets out to do, become 'es- 
 tablished,' and bide its time till the next dethrone- 
 ment." Even so; and there are Socialists, inconceiv- 
 able as it may appear, who endeavour to build up 
 their Collectivist State, so that unto the individual 
 citizen there may come greater freedom. Maybe 
 these men are again like unto the prophet Blake 
 when he was building Golgonooza, the sacred city 
 of his dreams, and"strivingwith systems to deliver 
 individuals from those systems." 
 The T'hree But why, for all his talking, does the modern So- 
 Spurs to the cialist find society wrong — what is the matter with 
 Modern it? Do we not often hear this question from the lips 
 
 Spirit that of the opulent tradesman, the well-endowed parson, 
 makes the the benevolent landlord ? Does it not, he asks, pro- 
 Socialist duce charmingpeople; have we not artists & poets; 
 are there not Rudyard Kipling and Alfred Austin? 
 Is there not Oxford with her Rhodes scholars; are 
 there not colonies where people can go if they have 
 no room at home? — we like life, we say with Lord 
 Melbourne, "Can't you let it alone ?" but the So- 
 cialist can't let it alone. Without wishing to destroy 
 all these things that he also values, and while lov- 
 ing all the good in them, he takes a different view 
 of life. He finds life, in the main, to be ugly, unjust, 
 
 ID
 
 and wasteful. He points to the industrial system, to 
 the great cities and their slums, to the poverty sta- 
 tistics, to the rural depopulation ; and he says : " this 
 is the price." He turns to ancient Greece & the Eng- 
 lish middle ages, and he says: "Has not a society 
 come before that has been, without doubt, more 
 beautiful and more harmonious than ours?" He 
 turns, and this is his latest turn, to the English poli- 
 tical system; and he says: "We will have a juster 
 arrangement of human opportunity, for has not 
 science shown us that the religious standards upon 
 which English society has grown up have all to be 
 reconsidered: medicine, chemistry, biology, socio- 
 logy, historical criticism, all alike point to this. 
 They point to the need for a readjustment of values." 
 i^ Ugliness, wastefulness, and injustice: these, I 
 think, may be fairly termed the three spurs to the 
 modern spirit that has made the Socialist. It is 
 needless to multiply instances of them, but seeing 
 that the political horizon is having so sinister, or 
 shall we say bright, an outlook just at present? — it 
 depends upon whether we regard the coming of 
 the great Administration of 1906 as a calamity or 
 triumph — some might be given. 
 
 I take ugliness first. I walk down the thirty miles of Ugliness 
 London from east to west,I look at thefilth of Man- 
 chester and Liverpool, I look at the dreariness of 
 the model city of Birmingham: what is the mean- 
 ing or the worth of it all, and the outcome of it all? 
 Is it not evident in the reports on physical degene- 
 ration, in the disasters of the South African war, in 
 the afternoon turns for children at the music halls, 
 
 1 1
 
 in the long lines of them standing outside waiting 
 their privilege to waste the shillings they earn by 
 casual labour. Again somehow I am carried back to 
 the Palaestra of Taureas, & think what Charmides 
 and his friends must have looked like when they 
 tried to arrive at their definition of Temperance, 
 Or, to take another illustration of ugliness, let us 
 considerthe inutilities that we produce: ugliness & 
 uselessness are not quite synonymous, but they are 
 nearly so. Look in at the shop windows, & consider 
 for a moment how all these things come into exis- 
 tence; it is not from any pleasure or joy to the pro- 
 ducer. An ugly thing may give pleasure to produce, 
 more often it gives none; a beautiful thing cannot 
 be produced without giving joy to the producer. 
 To produce a beautiful thing you need something 
 of the spirit of the dreamer, may we not plead for 
 his value once again to be given to him ? I was ask- 
 ing a clever and successful business man the other 
 day why he had closed down one of his workshops, 
 the work produced was so excellent and had in it 
 such character and spirit. "Yes," he replied, "that 
 is true, but the men dreamed too much over it, and 
 itdidnotpayme as good a return as myotherwork- 
 shops." There we have a characteristic showing up 
 of the adjustment of modern values. I could give 
 a hundred concrete examples of this in different 
 workshops that I know. There is no room under 
 the competitive system for the dreamer, however 
 good his work may be. It is not that society does 
 not want his work — society is only too glad to have 
 it — but the present organisation does not admit of 
 
 12
 
 its being done. He must either give up dreaming, 
 or starve. Society, as at present constituted, quali- 
 fies this mandate with the permission to allow him 
 to go on dreaming if he have independent means, 
 not otherwise. 
 
 It says : "You may be an amateur, but — well ! no, 
 you must not do the thing properly ! " — and that is 
 the present economic position of the arts in this 
 country. They are either being crushed out by 
 mechanical conditions, or carried on en amateur by 
 those who have other means of support, or they are 
 supported by the marginal incomes of men. They 
 are not wanted : they have no sound economic basis. 
 c^The appreciation of beauty by society, of what 
 its function should be, of how it should be pro- 
 duced, and of how those who are capable of pro- 
 ducing it should be valued, is not alone necessary: 
 it is just. Unless society grows to understand the 
 j ustice, and makes room for the producer of beauty, 
 for the dreamer in the workshop or elsewhere, it 
 incurs a great liability which no financing will 
 make right. When all is said & done, your dreamer 
 is the most powerful force in the whole body poli- 
 tic. It is he who puts the music and the song into 
 literature, it is he who fits the imagination into the 
 machinery, it is he who stamps the character and 
 the beauty on to craftsmanship. The dreamer is in- 
 deed one of the hard facts of modern life that we 
 have to reckon with. He will not be compelled. At 
 the present moment he asks for justice, for the right 
 to live, for scope to his dreaming; and society has 
 somehow got to meet him, or society makes of him 
 
 13
 
 a dangerous enemy. He is very laconic; he only says 
 to society: " If you can't find a place for me, I shall 
 try & blow you up." That is an aspect of Socialism 
 that is not sufficiently considered. 
 I have met many men in my life in the workshops 
 who had what the Germans call Empjindung, who 
 have had the artistic sensibility that makes a good 
 artist or craftsman. Where these men have had an 
 economic independence, or been allowed to work 
 decently at the work for which they were fitted, it 
 has been well with them; where not, they have in- 
 variably hankered after revolutionary Socialism. 
 Yet all the time it was not Socialism they wanted; 
 it was beauty, and the freedom to create. 
 Wastefulness Ugliness brings us to wastefulness, the second spur 
 to the modern spirit. Again a hundred examples 
 might be shown — but take one that is obvious to 
 every man. I walk down any railway platform ; I see 
 matches strewn about, the phosphor tips just burnt, 
 the match sometimes not scratched. A scandalous 
 extravagance of the consumer, we say. Very likely. 
 Perhaps if he had to pay sixpence for every box, in- 
 stead of getting twelve boxes for a penny, he might 
 be more frugal. But who makes these matches .? 
 What manner of life do their producers lead? What 
 right have we to fling matches away, even if we 
 have paid sixpence a box for them as we should, in- 
 stead of a penny for twelve boxes as we do. We may 
 well recall the lines: 
 
 " Oh, men with mothers and wives! 
 It is not linen you're wearing out, 
 But human creatures' lives."
 
 The match is but a symbol of our system of produc- 
 tion, of its wastefulness. 
 
 Or yet again, take the case of the daily paper. I have 
 in my pocket one copper penny representing, let us 
 say, labour of mine, which I wish to exchange for 
 the news of the hour: I wish to know whether the 
 Democracy has won any more Labour seats, or 
 whetherthe Kaiser's ubiquity has sent anothertele- 
 gram to anybody. I obtain my news; and, thrown 
 in with it, I have the services of a very delightful 
 sparrow-like London newspaper boy, who runs up 
 the ladderof my omnibus forthe privilegeof bring- 
 ing it me. Good; but is that all? Now mark the 
 waste. With that news,which I gut in five minutes, 
 come four, eight, ten, sixteen closely, laboriously 
 printed pages of all sorts of stuff, and at bottom of 
 all its "solid basis of commercial advertisement." 
 With my own pennyworth of paper, there are a 
 million other papers doing the same. 
 And when we ask ourselves what is this waste main- 
 taining, what do we see ? Thousands of machines; 
 hundreds of thousands of ugly lives, lives of little 
 real value to the community; armies of pressmen 
 and compositors, bitterly, savagely hostile to the 
 industrial system, and fighting it through their 
 Trades Unions to the utmost of their power. The 
 Father of my Chapel of printers assures me that 
 there isnothing for it but the abolition of the whole 
 system ; simultaneously another friend, the em- 
 ployer of many Chapels, the owner of thousands of 
 machines, says to me: "The men are idle: you've 
 no notion how idle they are; the only way to make 
 
 15
 
 a modern press pay is to run it on a large scale, and 
 drive an immense volume of work through it." He 
 does not add, but it is evident he means, the work 
 must be done, not because it is wanted, but because 
 it pays, & must be made to pay. Shall not the com- 
 munity ask, Cui bono? 
 
 Thus does the consideration of waste bring us di- 
 rectly back to that readjustment of value with 
 which we started. Socialism, if my definition of it 
 be accepted, necessitates a reconstruction of values 
 everywhere, in all people, in all things. One man is 
 worth more to the commonwealth than another: 
 one thing is of greater value towards national life 
 than another thing. "There is no equality," says 
 modern Socialism," and if you accept me, you must 
 accept a readjustment of values." After one hun- 
 dred years of corrosive Liberalism that has sapped 
 & undermined all standards,we are on the threshold 
 of a new State; and we ask ourselves, of what ma- 
 terials are we building its bases. 
 Be it men or be it things, the same gauge must be 
 used. If we accept the principle of the protection of 
 labour, are we not driven logically to a recognition 
 of standard, to the creation of new standards? or is 
 all labour to be protected irrespective of its value to 
 the community? That is not a position that is for a 
 moment tenable, but it is one that is still held by 
 many Socialists & by members of the Labour party; 
 and it is held because the question of values has not 
 yet been thought out. As soon as an intrinsic value 
 is recognised in men as in their productions, so soon 
 will the Socialistic principle of the protection of 
 i6
 
 labour become the ethical corner-stone not alone 
 of one party — the Labour party — but of thewhole 
 commonwealth. 
 
 Wastefulness, the second spur to the modern spirit Injustice 
 that has made the Socialist, brings us to the third, 
 to injustice, which to the seeming of most men is 
 probably the most important of the three. For my- 
 self I confess that given less waste and more beauty, 
 injustice would have less weight with me; but the 
 Christian spirit in us asks for more equality of op- 
 portunity, and the Christian & the Pagan in human 
 beings is largely temperamental. To me, as a pro- 
 ducer, the injustice of the modern condition strikes 
 home most on the productive side. I do not think 
 it is fully enough realised by the simple-minded 
 man in the street how great is the taxation upon 
 the producer before he can hand his piece of work 
 to the consumer. We talk vaguely about rent and 
 interest and other charges being taxes on labour ; 
 yet this is strictly true. There are somehow or other 
 hundreds of people in between, nameless, harmless, 
 kindly, comfortable folk, who get each their little 
 squeeze out of labour before Brown at one end of 
 the bench can hand his tale of work to Smith at the 
 other. True, they get a squeeze out of the consumer 
 too ; but the producer stands to lose the most, and 
 he stands to lose first. 
 
 I put it to myself thus. I am a producer: I build 
 buildings; & I conduct some eight different work- 
 shops. Before I can sell my works — the wrought iron 
 gates formy houses, the furniture for my rooms, the 
 metalwork for my fireplaces, the silver for my table 
 b I 17
 
 service,the jewellery for my lady customers to wear, 
 or the books for the intelligent men folk to read — I 
 have to put on 10,20, 30,40, 50, even 100 per cent., 
 it varies with the competition & speculation of the 
 market, so that it sometimes happens that an article 
 which in my shop I can make for ^i o after paying 
 material and wages to myself or the craftsman, I 
 cannot sell for under ^20. Where does the other 
 ^ I o go to? Well, there is a percentage to the land- 
 lord, another to the capitalist ; there are commis- 
 sions to middlemen, to distributors; there are large 
 advertisement charges ; there are paymen ts to agents 
 and lawyers & mortgagees; and there is a large per- 
 centage for writing down and depreciation owing 
 to the risk and uncertainty of it all. Now it is not a 
 question of right nor wrong: I as producer do not 
 mind paying this if all goes well, and I can live and 
 go on with my work — but there comes a bad time, 
 a period of commercial depression, & I as the pro- 
 ducer have my wages docked or I am sold up be- 
 cause all these others have their first squeeze. What 
 the producer demands in the reconstructed State is 
 a readjustment of values, where he shall be better 
 considered; and when we look into it, is it not the 
 producer who is always rebelling .? 
 Socialism & To many kind, good folk, all this has but one grim, 
 ike rights new look — an attack upon property, an onslaught 
 of private upon the Haves by the Have-nots. I asked a work- 
 property man the other day which way he voted at the re- 
 cent Election. He laughed. " Fve everything to gain 
 by voting Liberal, but I should vote Conservative 
 if I could afford it. That shrewdly hit the nail on 
 18
 
 the head; and that, I suspect,will remain the mental 
 attitude of most men until more of the quality of 
 idealism enters into politics. The transfer of pro- 
 perty by taxation is but a matter of expediency, it 
 is no new thing. Kings, governments, parliaments 
 have done it from remote time : the newness lies 
 in the assumption, which so many of the good folk 
 make, that the wealth of the community is limited, 
 and the confusion they make between wealth and 
 riches. 
 
 It is easy to demolish the dear old fetish of equal- 
 ity, and the other old fetish that stands on the same 
 bracket, the dividing-up or equalisation of pro- 
 perty : these are not either of them a part of the 
 Socialistic Faith as I understand it. Rather do they 
 represent the reductio ad absurdum of the ancient 
 Liberalism of the Revolution which the Construc- 
 tive Socialist has left behind him. All men are 
 created equal, says the American Declaration of 
 Independence ; but it does not need merely the mo- 
 dern American to deny the truth of this. All men 
 are not equal, they never can be, they never will be. 
 In the Socialistic State their values, as I have al- 
 ready pointed out, must admittedly vary. So cor- 
 respondingly must be their holding in private pro- 
 perty. I, for my part, prefer to keep myencheiridion 
 to myself, also my tooth brush. So does every man 
 who has inteUigence & sense enough to use either. 
 g@.But it does not follow that because we insist as 
 sensible men upon the personal necessities of pro- 
 perty, that we should always continue to attach the 
 importance that we now do to its sacred rights. 
 b2 19
 
 " Howbeit what speak we of other men's and our 
 own," said the greatest and wisest of English Chan- 
 cellors,"! can see nothing (thething well weighed) 
 that any man may well call his own. But as men call 
 him a fool that beareth himself proud, because he 
 jetteth about in a borrowed gown, so may we be 
 well called very fools all, if we bear as proud of any- 
 thing we have here." The fear with which the or- 
 dinary Englishman regards what to him appears 
 the attack, of the Socialist upon property is very 
 natural, but in his fear he forgets his history. Most 
 great political changes have implied some readjust- 
 ment of property — a readjustment often thought 
 iniquitous by those whose goods were readjusted, 
 unless they were far-sighted enough to see the 
 greater service implied in the change.We need not 
 multiply instances, but I conceive the predatory 
 barons of the day of King Stephen bitterly resenting 
 the destruction of their private property in castles 
 by King Henry. Or shall we put ourselves into the 
 mental attitude of some Abbot of the dissolution 
 time, when he saw the estates of our modern Eng- 
 lish nobility carved out of Fountains, Rievaulx, 
 Arundel, and Evesham ? Or, to come to still more 
 modern times, can we spare no sympathy for the 
 confiscation of the estates of the Jamaica planters 
 that freed the slaves, or the cancelling of the privi- 
 leges of the mediaeval guilds that gave us the free 
 towns and made possible the industrial growth of 
 modern England? In all these cases the plea was the 
 sacred rights of private property, but it was expe- 
 dient in the interest of the community to ignore 
 
 20
 
 that plea, and what has happened before may hap- 
 pen again. 
 
 Perhaps it will be said that I am treating the sub- Pohttcai 
 ject of Socialism too speculatively, giving it an in- Socialism 
 sufficient bearing on politics. Well, let us examine 
 our definition in relation to such questions as Ta- 
 riff Reform, Old Age Pensions, Control of the In- 
 struments of Production, the Land, the Empire, the 
 Church. But in so doing let us remember that when 
 we touch politics, we touch doubt, self-interest, 
 compromise — so that all questions when regarded 
 politically are open questions. Let us hear what the 
 Political Socialists have to say ; and weigh them 
 up. Here is the programme of Political Socialism 
 as it presents itself to us at this moment. The more 
 ordinarily used word for the political measures 
 proposed is Collectivism. I extract from a recent 
 official pronouncement of the Independent La- 
 bour Party. " Collectivism," says the chairman of Collectivism 
 this party, "is obviously the next stage in Indus- and the 
 trial and social organisation." Assuming we grant I.L.P. 
 this rather large premise — and appearances are in 
 its favour — what is proposed.? "The I.L.P.," con- 
 tinues the manifesto, "knows this, and seeks to aid 
 natural progress. We aim step by step, as rapidly as 
 experience and conditions will justify, at transfer- 
 ring the land, the railways, the mines, commercial 
 monopolies, all public monopolies, all public ser- 
 vices, to public ownership and democratic control; 
 & meanwhile by taxation reform to redress inequa- 
 lities of position, using the proceeds of taxation to 
 raise the standard of national education, national 
 
 21
 
 health, national comfort, and national efficiency." 
 Values in i^.Let us assume that the principle of State con- 
 monopoly trol is further granted. This again is a very question- 
 able assumption, for there are many things,! could 
 cite nearly all my own particular work in illustra- 
 tion, which will always be better done by the indi- 
 vidual or by personal interest than by a department. 
 But let us for the moment grant the principle of 
 State control as foreshadowed by the I.L.P., are we 
 not pulled up at once by the question : What if our 
 commercial monopolies in themselves are wrong ? 
 If theyare,will any special advantage accrue to the 
 community in conducting them for national pur- 
 poses ? Rather the reverse, it may be said. 
 I do not raise the point in any hypercritical sense, 
 for in many things State control seems to be essen- 
 tial, but rather with a view to eliciting the ethical 
 principle that must underlie any such action as is 
 proposed by the I.L.P. before the action itself can 
 be justified or made effective. The hasty Socialist 
 will doubtless answer: " Oh, yes, but if the mono- 
 poly is harmful, we will extinguish it," to which 
 the philosopher naturally answers: "Determine 
 your values first"; and the man in the street may 
 not unreasonably argue that a State monopoly in 
 which the whole community is interested may be 
 harder to extinguish than something conducted for 
 the benefit of an offensive few. Or let me put an- 
 other view of the case. My own particular study 
 has been the influence of machinery upon the han- 
 dicrafts, upon craftsmanship, and upon the life of 
 the workman. I have arrived, after twenty years of 
 
 22
 
 inductive observation, at the conclusion that in the Values tn 
 various industries,many of them what the Socialist machinery 
 w^ould call monopolies, with which I am familiar, 
 40 per cent, of the machinery used is harmful and 
 mischievous, 60 per cent, possibly beneficial. I do 
 not wish, even if I grant the premise of Collectiv- 
 ism, to see the State conduct, much less make pro- 
 fit out of, what I conceive to be in itself mischievous 
 & useless. I plead for the recognition of an ethical 
 principle, once again a reconsideration of values. 
 A necessary step, therefore, in a sane social rebuild- 
 ing must be the discovery of such ethical principle 
 as shall guide us in the right or wrong of produc- 
 tion, the Wealth and Illth,asJohnRuskin called it, 
 of the community. We cannot arrive at this all at 
 once; but we must make up our minds, when we 
 are handling political problems, that it is a point 
 we have to make for coincidently with our other 
 reforms. Collectivism, in short, is not, as the hasty 
 Socialist assumes, an end in itself: rather is it a 
 means of arriving at the end when we have deter- 
 mined our course, and it is not the only means. 
 This does not militate against the need nor the fit- The need for 
 ness of a Labour party in the new social organism; a Labour 
 on the contrary it rather emphasises the need, since party to help 
 a Labour party is much more likely than any other determine 
 to discover those very rights & wrongs in industry values 
 which the wise legislator is ever seeking to attain. 
 The philosopher, however, and perhaps the ordi- 
 nary level-headed Englishman, may be excused 
 from following the Labour party when, passing out 
 of its sphere, it makes pronouncements — they may 
 
 23
 
 be right or wrong — upon such subjects as Indian 
 Reform, Chinese Labour on the Rand, Naval Stra- 
 tegy, and so forth. Good cobblers are an essential to 
 ^ every community, but they should stick to the last. 
 
 If there is one need more generally admitted than 
 others in the Socialistic State with its extended de- 
 mocratic basis, it is government by the expert in 
 matters requiring expert knowledge. 
 Values and The determination of the value in machinery, ma- 
 citizenship chinery which is and must remain the basis of our 
 new State, immediately raises the kindred question 
 of the value in the human beings employed in the 
 processes of machine production. When I made 
 my rough and ready computation just now of the 
 60 per cent, of good and the 40 per cent, of useless 
 machinery in the trades with which I am familiar, 
 I had in mind all those trades in which human in- 
 dividuality is an important element, the trades of 
 the builder,thejoiner, the carver,the cabinetmaker, 
 the blacksmith, the silversmith, the jeweller, and 
 so forth. But there are other trades in which human 
 individuality is hardly wanted at all,trades in which 
 the proportion in value will be largely reversed, 
 various forms of engineering, for instance chain- 
 making, and all such industries where the aim, let 
 us say, is not an individual piece, nor the expression 
 of a man's individuality at all, but compliance to a 
 pattern to be repeated a thousand-fold, exactitude, 
 and where the more the machine is used and the 
 less man, the better. 
 
 In these trades, then, how about the men? The men 
 as citizens, how about their education, their value 
 
 24
 
 to the community ? At present we not only do no- 
 thing for them, but we are very rapidly creating in 
 this country, through the necessities of industrial 
 development, an enormous class of casual labour 
 which is a growing menace to the State. The level- 
 headed Socialist who has set before himself the de- 
 termination of right and wrong in machinery will, 
 I conceive, argue somewhat in this way — I have 
 heard the case thus stated from the lips of a large 
 employer of Labour who apologised for preaching 
 what sounded like Karl Marx: " We have in all in- 
 dustries two things to consider, the economical ne- 
 cessities of the industry and the moral duty to the 
 individual. If the necessitiesof the industry compel 
 us to make of our workman a mere casual, a tool, 
 an adjuct to our machinery, we must face the fact, 
 and meet the civic duty in another way — and how.? 
 We must raise his wages, and limit his hours of 
 work; we must compel him to be educated, and 
 make of him a decent citizen in his spare time, as 
 distinct from his working time. And all this must 
 be paid for either by the industry that is engaged in 
 destroying citizens or by the community." 
 Another rearrangement of property, it will be said, The value of 
 but again with the object of arriving at a readjust- the casual 
 ment of values — in this case, the value of the casual. 
 The casual, as is obvious to all, may have an eco- 
 nomic value, a very slight one, to the master of in- 
 dustry; but he has no intrinsic value. Other than 
 this economic value, he has no value to the State at 
 all; rather the reverse, he is a minus quantity. Ob- 
 viously we must in some way tax those industries 
 
 25
 
 that are responsible for his production ; & we must 
 insist as a community that he shall be decently- 
 housed, educated, and disciplined — in short, we 
 must make a citizen out of the Yahoo. 
 Value and But can this be accomplished without some sort of 
 the tariff Protection,withoutatariflF, in short? I do not think 
 so, but I know many masters of industry who think 
 otherwise. Our knowledge of this problem is not 
 yet sufficiently advanced: our political action is too 
 likely to be empirical; we have to get more at the 
 underlying principles, the ethics of our problem; 
 we shall find it out in time. The question of a tariff 
 involves other issues which I will not here discuss; 
 but for my part,before a tariff be so much as broached, 
 I would have the question of the intrinsic values of 
 the industries it proposes to include, rightly deter- 
 mined. What sort of a tariff should it be ? What 
 should it protect ? In whose interest shall it be 
 framed ? Shall it protect things at all, or men, or 
 only principles, such as the standard of life ? That 
 is an aspect in the touchstone of "value" that will 
 some time have to be considered. So far neither 
 political party in England appears to have given 
 the matter thought, while the Socialist, when he 
 has stepped into the political arena at all, has con- 
 tented himself with borrowing the cast-off duds of 
 Cobdenism. Idonot think this is likely tocontinue. 
 It is idle to predict, and all political predictions are 
 falsified in one way or another, but it seems to me 
 not improbable that within ten years the Labour 
 party will be led by the tiscal reformer. It must de- 
 pend upon the speed and completeness with which 
 26
 
 they can first carry through their other and more 
 urgent reforms. But those reforms postulate in 
 themselves a readjustment of values ; and if they 
 succeed in this, v^ill not the Labour party, w^ill not 
 the Socialists, be face to face with the problem of a 
 tariff? 
 
 I put it thus. The Labour party are committed be- 
 fore all things to the principle of the protection of 
 labour, the maintenance of the standard of life. If 
 they achieve their reforms, and above all, the basic 
 reform of the establishment of the principle of the 
 minimum wage, they must sooner or later be faced 
 with the question of foreign competition in those 
 industries in which the principle is admitted. Let 
 us take the case of the matches again. Our Labour 
 party, we will say, has carried a triumphant mea- 
 sure through the House of Commons, by which 
 this poisonous industry of matchmaking is super- 
 vised, inspected, cleaned up and controlled, so that 
 "phossy jaw" has become a bogey of the past, and 
 the community has admitted that a standard rate ot 
 wage for the match girl shall not be less than what- 
 ever the amount is that the Trade Union considers 
 will give her a decent living. I am with the Trade 
 Unions absolutely in this, and consider that they 
 must be the best judge of what it should be. But 
 now comes the crux. Can the Trade Union in Pop- 
 lar control the manufacturer in Sweden or in Japan ? 
 And if, as the result must be, the price of the Eng- 
 lish match must rise to give the English match girl 
 a better life, is it not probable that the 'Match makers 
 United,' or whatever its name may be, will instruct 
 
 27
 
 its delegate to support the Mr. Chamberlain of the 
 day ? I see no other way out but the extinguishing 
 of the industry, and that is an alternative that per- 
 haps commends itself to many. It would to me as an 
 artist, as a producer of things that need every pos- 
 sible surrounding of beauty and dignity. 
 A tariff framed in the way the mediaeval guild reg- 
 ulations were framedjwith a view to the protection 
 of the standard of life, and not for the protection of 
 specific industries, appears to me the logical out- 
 come of the principle of the minimum wage. Nor 
 do I see any reason why national revenue should 
 not be built upon this. I do, on the other hand — 
 and here I find many Socialists are with me — see 
 strong reasons against basing revenue upon trades 
 that may in themselves be harmful, opium for in- 
 stance, or alcohol. A State in these matters may 
 surely be j udged as a man's household & occupation 
 in life arejudged.lt is betterfor him to draw his in- 
 come from sources about which he feels no shame, 
 and which do him no hurt. The analogy must not 
 be pressed too far, but it seems to me probable that 
 the Socialist of the future may readjust the bases of 
 revenue with a view to maintaining the principle 
 of the minimum wage. We are not there yet, but as 
 soon as Socialistic legislation has shifted a little fur- 
 ther the profits and responsibilities of different in- 
 dustries from competing capitalists to the workers 
 and the State, the question must arise and grow 
 acute. That will be the hour of the tariff reformer, 
 and what now to the official Liberal is the power of 
 darkness. 
 28
 
 In many ways is modern legislation bringing us Value and 
 nearer to the medieval way of looking at things, old-age pen- 
 only it has widened the scope. Where the mediasval sions 
 social orderwas encircled by the guild & the town, 
 the modern order, as it affects labour, is either cos- 
 mopolitan or has its boundaries in the State. The 
 demand of the working classes, a perfectly wise 
 and logical one, for a State-aided old-age pension 
 scheme is an illustration of this. It is likely, too, 
 when carried out, to have an immense influence in 
 the readjustment of values. 
 
 Let us for a moment take another aspect of the 
 question of human values in industry. A man's ca- 
 pacities, skill or thought after a certain age are still 
 good, though he cannot produce so quickly. My 
 experiencelies among skilled craftsmen, and I find, 
 like many other employers, that after a certain age 
 the inevitable tendency to slacken throws a man 
 out of the running, but though to him the tools 
 grow blunter,the wood gets harder, his brain is still 
 acute, he still has his experience, his knowledge of 
 tips, of detail is still there. A less individualistic 
 system would provide for these men: the private 
 business that is hampered by competitive condi- 
 tions cannot, the private business must throw such 
 material away. But it is obviously wasteful to the 
 commonwealth to cast these men aside, to regard 
 their market value only. There are exceptions : a 
 very wealthy or a very prosperous business may 
 pension off orotherwiseprovide for its oldservants, 
 such a business may even take work from them at 
 more than its market value, and take less profit or 
 
 29
 
 write down its stock accordingly ; but a business 
 that is in the hands of the outside capitahst,or that 
 is not paying well, simply cannot afford to do so, 
 and goes under as a reward for its altruism or kind- 
 liness. The larger and more inflexible a business be- 
 comes, or the further its producers get separated 
 humanly from its owners or shareholders, the more 
 waste must there be in the finer values of men. 
 This was brought home to me once when visiting 
 the Westinghouse works at Pittsburg, & discussing 
 the question of values with one of the vice-presi- 
 dents of that marvellous organisation. I asked if the 
 American democratic principle of scope for every 
 man still held good among the 10,000 employes. 
 Could any man of the necessary ability still rise to 
 the top? My friend hesitated: "He might become a 
 foreman," said he; then feeling the drift of my ques- 
 tion, he hesitated again : "Well, if he have great 
 organising ability ; only then." In short, the great 
 organisation had no use for anything but this; all 
 the other values passed like small pebbles through 
 the sorting sieve. There was no use for them. The 
 bearing of this upon guilds, co-operative societies, 
 labour co-partnerships, indeed upon all kinds of 
 corporate trading, is evident. Such businesses can 
 only succeed if they have two requisites: they must 
 have the personal interest of their employes, and 
 they must be able to give to their employes perma- 
 nent security of livelihood. Any distribution of the 
 burden of maintaining the old or partially skilled 
 after a certain age, any old-age pension scheme, 
 would help enormously in this direction. It would 
 
 30
 
 give a great impetus to the co-operative, as distinct 
 from the competitive, business; and it would be an 
 immense boon to the finer types of business, the 
 businesses that are more regardful of intrinsic 
 values, by relieving them of a moral burden v^^hich 
 their less scrupulous competitors shirk on strictly 
 "business" grounds. 
 
 These economic problems have a curious way of 
 interacting humanly; & the old-age pension ques- 
 tion is likely to affect businesses on the side of their 
 productive value to the community in more ways 
 than one. A reason for this lies in what may be called 
 the use and abuse of interest on capital. Every con- 
 scientious citizen has to make provision for his old 
 age : the weekly wage-earner can barely do it ; the 
 rest of us do it by means of interest on capital saved, 
 the system by which everybody tries to get on 
 everybody else's back. Interest implies a saddling 
 of the community with charges in perpetuity. Now 
 it may be right and wise that great endowments or 
 charities should be saddled upon the community 
 in perpetuity, but the case is different so far as each 
 man's poor little life is concerned. At present, how- 
 ever, let a man be as conscientious as he will, he 
 cannot help himself: if he wishes to safeguard his 
 old age, he must put the saddle upon perpetuity. 
 The State old-age pension would set free the man 
 who does not wish to do this. It would lighten the 
 community of a burden by distributing it. It would 
 do more: it would free all those, & there are many, 
 who have no real desire to gather together riches, 
 from the burden to which they are set ; it would 
 
 31
 
 help the dreamer, the artist, the philosopher. One 
 of the reasons why only the rich are interested in 
 having beautiful things made, why they alone are 
 patrons of the arts, is that the rest of us for the most 
 part are too absorbed in accumulating capital with 
 a view to securing interest for old age. We buy a 
 little shoddy to keep us going on because we know 
 no better ; we cannot give thought to the produc- 
 tion of beautiful or life-giving things until we have 
 fixed on the saddle in perpetuity. 
 A communal provision for old age would give an 
 entirely new colour to the question of interest on 
 capital. It would make the fixing on of the saddle 
 less necessary. It would make it possible for a man 
 to live more on his capital, or to invest his capital 
 in things that were beautiful and life-giving. An 
 examination of the conditions of life & production 
 in the middle ages will show how standard of ex- 
 cellence in work synchronises with care for old age 
 in the daily method of life. At the time when the 
 guilds were doing their finest work they also had 
 the most strict and humane regulations as to the 
 protection and care of the infirm and aged. The 
 guild system of pensioning was adapted to the con- 
 ditions of medieval industry; if it did nothing else, 
 it freed men's minds of much care. We cannot re- 
 vive it, but the Constructive Socialist points to its 
 results and says : "Give me something that I can 
 apply to modern industrial conditions, that has a 
 like spirit, and a like regard for human values." 
 Socialism To come now to another problem of Socialism, So- 
 andthe land cialism and the land, or looking at the question in 
 
 32
 
 its most terrible aspect — the aspect in which it ap- 
 peals most to all — rural depopulation. The pheno- 
 menon of the "Deserted Village" is not alone an 
 English one. I have been in country parts in Bur- 
 gundy and New England, and seen precisely the 
 same thing; and the same causes that affect "Sweet 
 Auburn "in the 20th century in England appear to 
 operate in agricultural countries such as Hungary 
 — the agricultural life is suffering for the sake of 
 the industrial. The cause & effect of this are largely 
 international, and hence out of the direct control 
 of any individual state; where, however, the causes 
 are national and local, the remedy is in our hands. 
 A great deal can always be learnt by reducing a 
 question to its human bearings, by asking people 
 why they actually leave the country, and finding 
 out how country or town affects them when they 
 come or return thither. 
 
 Given asufficiently large number of replies,weshall 
 probably find the reasons to be three. First, the ab- 
 sence of opportunity for getting on,which involves 
 the question of wages, of the tenure of land, of ma- 
 chinery, and of the casual. Secondly, the backward- 
 ness of education in the country, which affects the 
 standard of intelligence ^Lnd pari passu the standard 
 of life. Thirdly, the want of social unity due to the 
 decay of the old landed system, & the fact that no- 
 thing yet, unless it be the town, has taken its place. 
 4@kMy own work as an architect has brought me 
 into touch not only with a good many forms of la- 
 bour in the country, in at least ten different coun- 
 ties, but of country labour drawn into the towns; 
 
 c I 33
 
 and as I was influential some years ago in bringing 
 1 50 people from the town into the country, I have 
 had an opportuniy of looking at the question from 
 different sides. I find, except in cases of the highest 
 skill, that country labour is better than town labour. 
 I find the best types are those where the town stim- 
 ulus is applied to the country stock. Among the 
 many hundreds of workmen & labourers that have 
 passed under my notice, I have never found any un- 
 willingness to work, except where casual employ- 
 ment had destroyed capacity. I have found myself 
 often forced by economic pressure to pay less than 
 I knew the man to be really worth, nay, even less 
 than I knew he could decently live on. I have found 
 that, in the part of the country where I live, the 
 labour of willing and intelligent lads is to be picked 
 up at three shillings a week, and that often without 
 any offer of compensating prospects; this wage, it 
 is perhaps needless to point out, is not one upon 
 which a lad can be decently kept, especially where, 
 as often appears, the father earns a precarious twelve 
 shillings a week — wages in my district dropping as 
 low as ten shillings, and that not regular. But I 
 have not found, as comfortable folk are so often 
 fond of saying, that lads of from 16 to 19 "crave 
 for urban life and its amusements." Lads of this age 
 are scarce likely to crave for what they know no- 
 thing about. I have, on the other hand, found the 
 opposite to be true — viz., that lads who have been 
 accustomed to town life and its amusements prefer, 
 if they have been taken into the country, not to re- 
 turn thither if they can possibly avoid it. Two 
 
 34
 
 things alone are needed: you must not lower their 
 standard of life, and you must provide sensible and 
 human forms of education and recreation.Thecrux 
 of the labour question, in the country as in the 
 town, is the "casual," the product of machinery. 
 There are those who, purring with comfort, point 
 to the casual labour and ask: "Is it worth more?" 
 Possibly not economically, but how about the 
 values — the intrinsic and the economic ? Ought 
 it not to be worth more, is what we have to ask, and 
 is it not our duty as a community to make it worth 
 more ? We are at the present moment, in English 
 country parts, deliberately wasting our human ma- 
 terial.The two most significant facts of the country 
 side where I dwell are the gang of men and boys at 
 the village end with no occupation and no chance 
 of getting permanently on to the land, and the 
 marked change in the lads — their moral, intel- 
 lectual & physical tone — after the age of 14, when 
 the elementary school discipline is removed, and 
 in its place is set — nothing. Before we can re-people iheSuggest- 
 the deserted village,we must emancipate the casual. ^^ Remedy 
 And how are we to do it ? Our Socialist steps for- of Socialism 
 ward with a remedy — a remedy nothing if not he- 
 roic. Transfer, says he, the land from private to 
 public control ; abolish the land monopoly. But 
 what does our Socialist mean by this ? And how, if 
 his fundamental assumption be sound, and again it 
 is a very large assumption, does he propose to carry 
 his plan out ? Can his plan be limited to these 
 islands? Would it be expedient, for instance, to na- 
 tionalise the land in one portion of the English- 
 C2 35
 
 speaking area without doing it elsewhere in our 
 colonies, let us say ? Could the small tenant of the 
 State, if the land were nationalised, stand without 
 protection against foreign competition ? And how 
 is the process to be brought about ? Tax rent, says 
 Mr. Henry George; but beyond the dislocation of 
 thousands of endowments and public interests, such 
 a taxation of rent would merely imply the taxing of 
 the landlord out of existence — and what then? The 
 State — in other words, a government department 
 — would be the landlord, and those of us who are 
 tenants now would pay our rent, perhaps not quite 
 so much, but still our rent, to a government official 
 instead of to a landlord's agent. It does not appear 
 to me that this will lead us very far, or stop the ex- 
 isting waste or depopulation, for I conceive that the 
 American or colonial millionaire who likes to live 
 in England will come just the same, will pay the 
 rent, will hire the coun try houses & the deer forests 
 from the State department; and all we shall have 
 gained will be the dispossession of some old country 
 gentlemen to make room for some colonial nouveau 
 riches with not quite so fine a standard of life. That 
 is what appears to be going on at the present: it is 
 the outcome of the type of legislation preached by 
 the antiquated radical individualist of fifty years 
 ago. But we seem to have reached a point where a 
 differentview of the land question is desirable; and 
 once again we have to look at it from the aspect of 
 a readjustment of values. All abstract speculation, 
 all vague theories as to land nationalisation, in this 
 country are unpractical; they are also out of date, 
 
 36
 
 now that Socialism has become a political force. 
 The Constructive Socialist will not, I believe, seri- 
 ously hold them; he will say, there is no reason, be- 
 cause I cannot have the land of the world, of the 
 English-speaking world, nationalised to-morrow, 
 that therefore I will not set about reforming the 
 English land system with a view to rehabilitating 
 the country side. And if he speak thus, is he not 
 likely to have the support at once of many English 
 Tories who look upon the depopulation of our vil- 
 lages as one of the tragedies we owe to our indus- 
 trial development. If he speak thus, he will be face 
 to face with the question of values in relation to 
 land; he will estimate severally the value of land- 
 lord, farmer, & labourer; he will consider, perhaps, 
 that a hundred homesteads of small holders, work- 
 ing under the direction of an intelligent and con- 
 scientious landlord, are a more valuable asset to the 
 community than a couple of large farmers, with 
 each his little group of listless casuals, haggling for 
 rent with the agent of an absentee owner ; he will 
 desire to see the good landlord tied to the land, and 
 the bad or the absentee landlord taxed off it ; and 
 he will conclude that land reform is much more 
 likely to be carried out wisely and well by that class 
 ofcountry gentlemen who live on their estates,who 
 have the tradition, the knowledge, and the love for 
 the land, than by amiable enthusiasts from London, 
 or political bagmen who preach abstract Socialism 
 to hungry labourers. Other More 
 
 It is rather with the desire to fix attention once Definite 
 again upon our problem of values than with any Remedies 
 
 Z7
 
 thought that what follows may have political bear- 
 ing, that I offer some suggestions — gathered from 
 the practical needs of villages I know well and in 
 which I have lived. Perhaps the Constructive So- 
 cialist may accept them; they are not new, & many 
 of them have been thrown before upon the turgid 
 waters of English politics. But I have never yet 
 heard a Socialist put forth any constructive pro- 
 posals dealing with the English land question : he 
 has either been frankly revolutionary, or his pro- 
 posals have been quite abstract and filmy — the 
 blowing of smoke darkly across the glass of truth. 
 Possibly, then, he may, with a view to political 
 needs, accept the following: I cannot say. They 
 seem to me to square with the Socialistic position, 
 as I understand it. 
 
 Some reform of the land laws, by which the small 
 man who wishes to work either singly or with his 
 fellows, shall be given more of a chance. The 
 small man has in many parts of the country to pay 
 twice, even four times as much, for his holding, as 
 the big man. 
 
 A simplification of legal difKculties and the legal 
 expenses in the transfer of land. There are too many 
 lawyers in between the labourer & the land. I have 
 known cases where the landlord has been kept two 
 years out of his rents, and the land allowed to lie 
 idle, simply because the lawyers were not satisfied 
 that their full fee for transfer, which amounted to 
 nearly four years rent, would be guaranteed to 
 them. 
 The creation of definite links Socially and Educa- 
 
 38
 
 tionally between English villages and schools and 
 Councils, and the establishment through them of 
 Colonial farms and schools. This could be done by- 
 means of the Educational machinery of the County 
 schools and land holdings in the colonies. Weneed 
 definite land links between English villages & Co- 
 lonial farms ; we must give other vents than the 
 town to our country surplus population. 
 An equalisation of rating so as to shift its grossly 
 unfair incidence. The result of the present system 
 is that the farmer is made an enemy to all progres- 
 sive or educational reform because he has to ipay 
 a disproportionate share of it. 
 Definite & consistent development of higher edu- 
 cation among village boys and girls between the 
 ages of 14 and 17, especially on its manual & social 
 sides. In an age of machinery humanism lies in the 
 hand rather than in the book. 
 The removal of the many difficulties that hamper 
 country industries, for instance in railway rates or 
 in stupid & unsuitable building bye laws. Country 
 industries mean home markets for the farmer and 
 the small holder, while for those engaged in them 
 they mean sweeter conditions of life than the great 
 city can give. 
 
 The encouragement of every possible form of co- 
 operation in villages : the study indeed of the me- 
 dicEval village & its life, the life of the pre-enclosure 
 days, seems to be fraught with usefulness for us in 
 the future. 
 
 Some reform of the ecclesiastical system, a change 
 in the conditions of the clergy freehold perhaps, 
 
 39
 
 by which country districts that needed it could be 
 relieved of the often serious incubus of old or in- 
 competent parsons. 
 
 Lastly the consistent encouragement of all forms 
 of sport, combined wherever possible with the ed- 
 ucational system. All good sport humanises. But 
 the particular form of sporting society that settles 
 upon the countryside for a month or so in the year, 
 like blow-flies on game, and then passes out of 
 sight, that is a very different thing. These people 
 are not only a nuisance, they are a mischief, they 
 dislocate the labour market, they stimulate casual 
 employment, they are in the nature of things un- 
 interested in the real work of the countryside, and 
 they set a false standard of life. As for an estate that 
 can no longer pay its way except by hiring itself 
 out to these for purposes of sport, the sooner it is 
 The value of mercifully taxed from existence the better. If in- 
 the loafer telligent English people would only get out of their 
 heads the idea, a purely townish obsession, that the 
 country is there to play or dream in, to shoot par- 
 tridges, orpaint water-colour landscapes, the better. 
 There is as big a question involved here as that of 
 the casual. The loafer at the top is as dangerous to 
 Society as the loafer at the bottom, and they may 
 be coupled together. The partridge & water-colour 
 point of view is a perfectly logical one ; the point 
 of view that we should not interfere, that the coun- 
 try should be used as the playground for the town, 
 or for people with nothing to do, the temporary 
 habitation of wandering Americans, and so forth, 
 but then let us talk no more of rural depopulation, 
 40
 
 for the sooner the crisis is over and the slovenly l^he Tory 
 casual's cottage replaced by the clean 'villa' of the Socialistn 
 'hanger-on' the better. 
 
 These I take it are all measures that would com- 
 mend themselves to the Constructive Socialist if 
 he be ready to step out of cloudy abstractions, and 
 if he hold with the old Englsh Tory to the need of 
 maintaining the agricultural life as the basis of all 
 other life. At the bottom of his heart I believe 
 every right-minded Englishman is a Tory on this 
 point, though perhaps with from two or three 
 generations of the artificial life of the great town, 
 his vision may have grown dim and his purpose 
 weak. It was Froude who said twenty-five years 
 ago, in reference to the English land system, that 
 were it not for our Colonial expansion no English 
 country seat would be worth twenty years' pur- 
 chase ; and it was Beaconsfield who at about the 
 same time likened the land of England to the pa- 
 tient ass that supported three people on its back, 
 landlord, farmer, & labourer. He added laconically 
 that perhaps as there was not room for all three, 
 one of them might sometime be slipping ofi^. 
 Rural depopulation and the migration into towns 'The 'English 
 shows that it is the labourer who is on the ass's tail, gentleman 
 but at the present moment landlord and farmer are and land 
 suffering too, there is no longer room for all three, reform 
 Socialism with its readjustment of values, points to 
 a change in the economic status of those that are 
 left, and it adds rather grimly perhaps, " those that 
 are left must work for their living." And why not ? 
 Every aristocracy that is worth its salt has worked 
 
 41
 
 for its living. It is just in this capacity for service 
 that the strength of the English landed class still 
 lies. They have the work in them, they have only 
 to become a little more conscious of the need for 
 doing it. To put it as one of their own number has 
 best put it, "we must get rid of the rotters." For 
 my part I prefer to see the English gentleman on 
 the land, & I do not want to see Montacute, Hard- 
 wicke, Knowle,or Penshurst turned into Salvation 
 Army Colonies ; but leadership by the gentlemen 
 must not imply too much squitch in the wheat, nor 
 too many cottages tumbling down, or the price of 
 leadership may be too dear. The reform of the Eng- 
 lish land system then, and its readjustment to the 
 conditions of the coming Socialist State, are mat- 
 ters best left to the English landed class themselves, 
 and I think they are likely to carry them out well, 
 especially when they realise that the alternative 
 may be 'economic dispossession.' 
 When we want to soften words we Latinize them, 
 but we can never get away from the hard facts that 
 underlie their imagery. My own people were on 
 the land for 500 years, till they were economically 
 dispossessed like many others by Free Trade. Now 
 I am particularly proud of having an ancestor on 
 the list of pardons in Jack Cade's rebellion, and I 
 sometimes fancy my forbears having satisfied them- 
 selves that Revolutionary Socialism was not much 
 use, submitted with a better grace to 'economic 
 dispossession' and learned to understand its wider 
 
 Socialism & bearings. 
 
 the Empire Let us now take another of the points where Social- 
 
 42
 
 ism touches upon political fact. It is usually suppos- 
 ed that Socialism & the conception of the British 
 Empire which we owe to the political genius of 
 Benjamin Disraeli are incompatible. I have never 
 been able to see it so. It is true that the artisan is as 
 yet unconvinced ; it is true there is India, that the 
 Primrose League has about it a somewhat factitious 
 splendour : there are also still I believe genuine 
 ' Little Englanders,' but the point of view of those 
 who have never seen England from across the seas 
 has in it a want of vision, a narrowness of political 
 outlook. With my conception of Socialism, the 
 Imperial England of Disraeli, of Cecil Rhodes, of 
 Rudyard Kipling is quite compatible. 
 It is not necessary to wag the flag, but let us at least 
 be level-headed, and, always saving some little of 
 our own national idealism, look at facts in the way 
 other nations look at them, ourselves included. In 
 the eyes of the rest of the world John Bull is merely 
 the successful pirate turned trader. Having eaten 
 his enemies piecemeal, the Spaniards, the Portu- 
 guese, the Dutch, the French, he now retires be- 
 hind a well protected counter and growls at people 
 who adopt ' American methods ' in the way of his 
 trade. Nor is this all. So successful has he been that 
 he has invented a sort of pseudo-philosophical 
 system to account for his success, and he has made 
 the unwarrantable assumption that other nations 
 must accept it even as he does himself; that what 
 suits him must suit them, that the kind of univer- 
 salism he has conceived as being good for the Eng- 
 lish temperament must be good for all other tem- 
 
 43
 
 peraments, if indeed, he adds complacently, there 
 be any. This is a wonderful world he says to him- 
 self, and I own 90 per cent of its strategic points ; 
 also I have linked them together with links of 
 gold. His constitutionalism, his latitudinarianism, 
 his comfortable tolerance, his even-handed justice, 
 they suit him, they must suit others. That is the ar- 
 gument, & every English political party, the ' high 
 Tory,' the 'old fashioned Whig,' the 'official Lib- 
 eral,' the ' Fabian Socialist,' are all more or less in- 
 fected with it. John Bull considers this quite na- 
 tural, for does he not tolerate all thesei? And so he 
 purrs to himself on the greatness of his invention, 
 repeating 'The parliament of man, the federation 
 of the world.' The high falute is no doubt very fine, 
 but does the Chinaman see it that way ? or the Slav 
 for instance .? While Tennyson is singing, Bismarck 
 has built up a Teutonic state with blood and iron; 
 other quite unforeseen things have happened, Nor- 
 way has effiscted a silent revolution and dethroned 
 a king, Hungary is sloughing off the House of 
 Hapsburg, America has discovered that there is a 
 colour problem, and Japan has taught the world 
 the significance of Bushido. 
 
 In view of all this does not our universal Social- 
 ism, our Industrial Democracy conceived in the 
 spirit of the 'Internationale,' the rally of united 
 labour against united capital, grow to be more and 
 more of a dream ? Indeed, Socialism as conceived 
 by Karl Marx, by William Morris, has struck upon 
 the rock of race. The Socialistic state if it be pos- 
 sible at all, must be a 'hortus inclusus' — a garden 
 
 -44
 
 walled around. The social standard of the English 
 aristocracy, the standard of hfe of English Trades 
 Unionism, alike point to this. H. G. Wells, when 
 planning his modern Utopia, boldly met this dif- 
 ficulty, the difficulty of circumvallation, by in- 
 trenching the whole planet. But we are not there 
 yet, politically; moreover the trend of all modern 
 development seems to be in the other direction. 
 The walls are being built about the different states, 
 and they are being built higher and higher. That is 
 why the tariff reform question bulks so large. It is 
 not merely an economic matter. It involves ethical 
 and racial considerations that are much more im- 
 portant than taxes, or duties on corn. Steam and 
 electricity have not, as used to be supposed, made 
 for the federation of the world ; so far, they have 
 disintegrated, they have broken up the nations. 
 The Constructive Socialist has, it seems to me, to 
 remodel his views on the empire in the light of 
 race, he has to re-classify, not necessarily putting 
 the Britisher at the top & all the others in different 
 grades below, nor with an inverted egoism holding 
 everything contemptible that other folk call patri- 
 otic, but noting them as different. He will learn 
 at least to make a lateral classification, and he will 
 do it as soon as he touches the hard facts of colour 
 and race. I speak from intimate knowledge here 
 because I have watched the change of mental atti- 
 tude in young East London workmen who have 
 started in life with strong Trades Union prejudices, 
 with keen Little England bias, and all the altruism 
 of the universal Socialist. I have watched these 
 
 45
 
 young men a few years later, after contact with the 
 negro, or in the colonies. Their altruism has not 
 changed, they have not become jingoes; but they 
 have grown conscious of a new dominant fact, the 
 fact of race, modifying Socialism, the fact that 
 English citizenship is in the race, not in the island, 
 the fact that their Socialism, if it be capable of ac- 
 complishment at all, must be limited by race. 
 A certain famous story of a meeting of American 
 bishops illustrates my meaning. A number of those 
 amiable gentlemen were gathered together upon 
 some Ethiopian mission, when one kind, white ec- 
 clesiastic ended his remarks on behalf of the negro 
 by quoting Wilberforce. "Shall I not," he cried 
 with fervour, " welcome him as a man and a bro- 
 ther?" "Why, certainly," replied a smart South- 
 erner who had views on the colour question, "but 
 not as a brother-in-law." 
 
 This ring fencing of colour, this circumvallation 
 
 of states, this creation of tariff walls for other than 
 
 merely economic ends, appears to me to be making 
 
 for Socialism as I understand it. The remote future 
 
 may have other things in store for the race, may 
 
 even bring us back again to Mr. Gladstone — who 
 
 knows? — but we have to conquer the present first; 
 
 and as Socialism grows more political, the new 
 
 State looms nearer. 
 
 T'rades In view of the fact, as of the ideal, of race & empire. 
 
 Unionism most of the great labour questions must change 
 
 and Labour their aspect and significance. I have touched upon 
 
 Bureaux the question of the casual, and the possibiiity of 
 
 outlet through English counties on to colonial 
 
 46
 
 farms.That is only one of the ways in which, for the 
 Socialist State, the empire must assume a new 
 meaning. There are many others. 
 It may be taken as an axiom that English labour 
 will not emigrate into foreign countries. Histori- 
 cally, English labour has ever absorbed, it has never 
 allowed itself to be absorbed — for we must except 
 the United States, since the English workman does 
 not regard the United States as a foreign country. 
 The Constructive Socialist will plan his labour 
 policy with due understanding of this. If therefore 
 we are to ease the pinch at home, especially during 
 times of trade depression, English labour must be 
 given more conveniences for flowing into its natu- 
 ral channels. And what are its natural channels .? 
 Race, religion, & language, plus the trade to which 
 it is accustomed. 
 
 The Cosmopolitan Socialist, just as does the Lib- 
 eral Free Trader of the old school, consistently ig- 
 nores this fact. He assumes that labour is as fluid as 
 capital, and that labour follows capital. Neither of 
 these assumptions are true. Also he seldom asks the 
 question: What is to happen to labour during the 
 time that capital & industry are in transition .? The 
 Cosmopolitan Socialist is too theoretical, the Con- 
 structive Socialist has not as yet applied himself to 
 the practical issues involved in the movements of 
 English labour outside England. 
 Not long after the South African war I was in Dur- 
 ban; and talking with the foremen and bricklayers 
 I met in the streets, I learned much that to me was 
 wonderful and suggestive, as one does when one 
 
 47
 
 touches men and their thoughts at the ends of the 
 earth. But I learned, among other things, that as a 
 result of the war and the temporary boom of build- 
 ing work in Durban, 300 New Zealand bricklayers 
 had come thither. Their Trade Union was admir- 
 ably organised, was in touch with their Govern- 
 ment, and they captured that work. Now I did not 
 begrudge the New Zealanders their greater smart- 
 ness in picking up such work as was going ; but 
 having just shut down building works of my own 
 in England and discharged many London brick- 
 layers, I knew very well that not a few of those men 
 would be on the unemployed list supported by the 
 rates. I knew, too, that the London bricklayers held 
 as an article of faith the "lump of labour theory." 
 Having just paid heavily for the war that brought 
 the boom in Durban and the slump in London, we 
 were now paying over again to maintain in forced 
 idleness our own bricklayers, while the better in- 
 dustrially organised colonial was harvesting the 
 work. 
 
 Or to take another illustration of the need of or- 
 ganising labour with a wider racial objective. I had 
 apprenticed to me four young cabinetmakers. At 
 the close of their pupilage they had all turned out 
 first-rate and highly-skilled workmen. When the 
 depression of trade set in in England in 1903, one 
 of them went to Canada through a personal intro- 
 duction of mine, doubled his wages without in- 
 creasing his cost of living, and wrote to the other 
 three advising them to do the same, & telling them 
 that there was plenty of work for men of their skill 
 48
 
 and type of training. One of them with the aid of 
 friends got together the necessary journey money 
 and went ; the other two were unable to do this, 
 having other ties that made it difficult, and within 
 the next six months they were tramping for work, 
 and applying to the Queen's Fund for relief. A la- 
 bour bureau, combined with a consolidated Trade 
 Union organisation over all the English-speaking 
 area, and with this an easy system of emigration 
 passes for labour, would have converted those ex- 
 amples of the natural movement of English labour 
 from caprice into a flow that was ordered and fair. 
 My London bricklayers would have learned a good 
 deal from their New Zealand mates in Durban; my 
 London cabinetmakers would not have lost valu- 
 able years of experience in craftsmanship, while 
 Scandinavians, Russians, and Poles were stepping 
 into their shoes in Canada. 
 
 The Constructive Socialist will, it seems to me, 
 seek to establish an imperial or racial labour organ- 
 isation; he will link up the Trade Union system 
 over the whole English-speaking area, standardize 
 and regulate the wages as far as possible, apply the 
 principle of the minimum wage to varying local 
 values and conditions of life, and give facilities to 
 labour for easily & temporarily shifting from place 
 to place. The English conservative holder of pro- 
 perty who wishes to be left undisturbed in his hold- 
 ing, will, unless he is very short-sighted, help the 
 Constructive Socialist in this. 
 This circulation of labour through the veins of the 
 empire by means of a labour organisation will, 
 d I 49
 
 moreover, have great social & educational advan- 
 tages. It will stimulate invention, it v^ill kindle 
 ideas, it will help to a better weighing of human 
 values. It will even bring again a little of the great 
 benefit of the " Wanderjahre," another of the good 
 things of the age before machinery which has been 
 lost to us. I have had many men through my work- 
 shops who had either come from or seen something 
 of our colonies; I have usually found them to be 
 wider, saner, and more sympathetic in their view 
 of life than those who had only seen England from 
 at home. I have wished for means by which I could 
 meet with more of their kidney. 
 T^he philo- Thus would it be possible to take each of the larger 
 sophk basis problems of politics, and re-examine them in the 
 for construe- light of modern Constructive Socialism,in the spirit 
 tive reform of our definition. I have touched upon only a few 
 of these problems, & upon all of them lightly. The 
 question of machinery, the instruments ofproduc- 
 tion,the minimum wage,the tarifF,the casual,the old 
 age pension, theland, the empire, the labour bureau, 
 and so forth; I could equally have taken the edu- 
 cation question, the navy, the question of conscrip- 
 tion, the penal code, & the poor law, and regarded 
 them from the aspect of values. My wish has been 
 not to suggest political expedients in respect of any 
 of these questions, but rather to point to a new at- 
 titude of mind with which to approach them. It 
 is not so much political expedients that we need in 
 our time, as a philosophic basis upon which such 
 expedients shall rest; and at present neither of the 
 two great political parties possess such a philo- 
 
 50
 
 sophic basis. If politics are to be saved from degen- 
 erating into unsavoury squabbles for the having of 
 material things, they must each find it. 
 Nor is the above point of view in anyway my own. 
 Rather have I tried to interpret the Zeitgeist as ex- 
 pressed in Constructive Socialism, and to do this 
 through the milieu of my own labour & experience 
 in life. So have I sought to discover whither its as- 
 pirations are leading us, to examine the good and 
 evil of what is proposed, and to test this good and 
 evil by the only tests we have — our Christian ethics, 
 the result of the civilisations that have gone before, 
 & modern scientific truth. Doubtless I have failed, 
 but it is over the multitude of small failures that 
 success lies in the end. 
 
 And so if we focus these considerations on to the Liberalism 
 political condition of our time, we see how the real and Con- 
 interest of the English elections of 1 906 is a philo- servatism 
 sophic interest. They represent not so much a 
 change of political parties as a change in national 
 thought. For the first time perhaps in English his- 
 tory, certainly for the first time since the French 
 Revolution, there has come into political existence 
 a party with a definitely constructive purpose, a 
 party as yet divided in itself, hesitating, leaderless 
 and unformed, but which does not accept the philo- 
 sophic basis of either Liberalism or Conservatism as 
 those terms have hitherto been understood. Hither- 
 to we have meant by Conservatism the maintenance 
 of existing institutions and forms of government, a 
 belief in them as right in themselves, & an admis- 
 sion that reform of any sort was justified only in 
 d2 51
 
 Socialism & 
 the Middle 
 Classes 
 
 extreme cases and where abuses had crept in to the 
 disordering of the State. No actual reconstruction 
 of the State has ever come within the bounds of 
 Conservative thought. 
 
 So too has it been with Liberalism. By this term 
 the ordinary Englishman has hitherto meant a cut- 
 ting away of needless restrictions, a pruning of pri- 
 vilege, a devolution of the feudal order, a freeing 
 of trade from all restraints, and a grudging recog- 
 nition that labour needs to be protected. But we 
 have never seen in Liberalism any constructive 
 principle; there has never been any question of a 
 new order, of a reconstruction of the State. The 
 philosophic basis of Liberalism has admitted of 
 this even less than Conservatism. But the elections 
 of 1 906 implied a change of thought in the people. 
 They have said in effect: "A plague on both your 
 houses, let us have something constructive"; and 
 the only person, whether for right or wrong, who 
 has anything constructive to offer is the Socialist, 
 because he, in the sense of our definition, holds 
 a faith whose objective is the betterment of society^ 
 which objective he seeks to arrive at through a more 
 equitable distribution^ based upon a more collective 
 production of wealth. He may be right or wrong, 
 he may be wise or foolish, he is certain to make 
 a great many mistakes ; but he has come upon us 
 of a sudden like a thief in the night, and we find 
 him a political fact in the British constitutional 
 system. 
 
 Like all great movements. Socialism has been 
 brought into being by the impact of a little ideal- 
 52
 
 ism at the top with the great mass down below that 
 needs it. Its weakness has been that, until quite re- 
 cently, it has made so little impression upon the 
 middle classes. There are signs that this is chang- 
 ing. I said before that the three spurs to the modern 
 spirit that made the Socialist were ugliness, waste- 
 fulness, and injustice. I want to speak now of the 
 constructive effort that has for the last twenty-five 
 years been setting itself to remedy the first of these, 
 and examine its relation to Socialism. 
 It is not sufficiently realised yet that the mission of 
 Ruskin, of Morris, of the Pre-Raphaelites, and of 
 the poets and writers that group with them, was a 
 mission to the middle classes; it set a new standard 
 of culture, for the upper class had its own tradition 
 of culture. I use the term as Matthew Arnold uses 
 it, to signify that wider, more humanistic regard 
 for the values of life. To the upper class in this 
 country, culture was a bequest from the great Eliz- 
 abethan period. The upper class, however, had not 
 been alone in its enjoyment of culture. The English 
 middle class that came into power in the Stuart 
 time,& in great measure also the mass of the people, 
 enjoyed it, though in a less degree, through the 
 17th and 1 8th centuries. But all this was changed 
 by the industrial revolution. Culture, except for the 
 upper class, was destroyed by machinery. The pro- 
 cess has been a gradual one, but it can be traced 
 with absolute precision. To anyone who has studied 
 the interior workings of productive businesses, 
 more particularly businesses not at great centres, 
 the workshops in country towns or the workshops 
 
 53
 
 of village craftsmen, this process of decay, and the 
 destruction of culture that has gone with it, is per- 
 fectly clear. Little by little the machine has entered, 
 has changed a process here, altered a method there, 
 first in one shop, then in another; but the tendency 
 has invariably been the same — to specialise, to re- 
 duplicate, to go into lines of work, and to simplify 
 by concentrating into factories and large towns. 
 For a long time this affected the upper class very 
 little. They held the land; and though their power 
 was taken from them on the coming of Free Trade, 
 they kept what was quite as good, their influence. 
 The great increase of riches, moreover, gave the 
 English countryside after the Repeal of the Corn 
 Laws an artificial prosperity. But the process of 
 real decay has been steady; the squeezing outof the 
 labourer, the small craftsman, the country work- 
 man, the gradual conversion of a working country- 
 side into a parasitic countryside, a pleasant place 
 for the well-to-do, whose income is drawn from 
 afar. The decay of the crafts has implied the decay 
 of the culture that went with the crafts; and so it 
 has followed as a consequence that culture has be- 
 come more and more the privilege of the wealthy 
 alone. 
 Culture and Here once again the problem of Socialism enters 
 the values with its readjustment of the values of life. While 
 of life the middle & working classes had their share of the 
 
 tradition of culture, there was no place for Social- 
 ism. But see what has happened by the end of the 
 19th century. The work of Watts, Rosetti, Burne 
 Jones, Morris,Carlyle, Arnold, Ruskin, Browning, 
 
 54
 
 Meredith, has made men think and teel in a way 
 they never did before. It has made them see the 
 need of new values; they have grown conscious of 
 the absence of and the necessity for beauty in life. 
 These men have held up the ideal of culture to the 
 middle classes. To be sure they were not all Social- 
 ists: the meaning of the word, much less its politi- 
 cal bearing, had hardly been considered in their life- 
 time; but they were all fired with that spirit that is 
 behind Socialism, that faith whose objective is the 
 betterment of society. How is that culture which 
 the machine has driven into banishment to be 
 found again ? The Constructive Socialist, if he has 
 studied this part of his subject at all, will answer 
 that it can come only in two ways — by a reorgan- 
 isation of the workshop, the methods of production, 
 and by the growth of leisure. 
 
 From the artistic point of view, these two needs go Culture^ 
 hand in hand. Where machinery is and must be the machinery 
 basis of the new State, avast quantity of production and leisure 
 must always remain which in itself is destructive of 
 culture. Here the workshop has to be reorganised, 
 so as to give leisure for culture outside the working 
 hours ; or, as the workmen phrase it, " Higher wa- 
 ges and shorter hours." But where machinery has 
 to be eliminated for the sake of the individuality of 
 the product, the workshop has to be reorganised so 
 as to provide more leisure inside it; or, as the work- 
 men phrase it, " Less drive." 
 
 This brings us to an aspect of our subject that we 
 have not so far considered in detail. Stripped of its 
 economic dress. Socialism implies a reintroduction
 
 into business, and business relations, of the human 
 values: the values as they were formerly under- 
 stood, and indeed still are by old-fashioned county 
 gentlemen and old-fashioned English businesses 
 where the stress of competition is not felt. But in- 
 dustrialism & machine production make, in them- 
 selves, for a cheapening and spoiling of the human 
 values; hence Constructive Socialism is for plan- 
 ning constant limitations upon industry with this 
 end in view. I do not, for the reasons I have already 
 given, consider that these limitations have been 
 properly worked out by the Constructive Socialist. 
 We have all lost sight too much of the real needs of 
 life to be able as yet to arrive at them; we are all 
 too much in the dark. There shall, says our Social- 
 ist, quoting the laws of medieval England, be no 
 forestalling, regrating, rigging of the market — 
 good ; but he ought to add: there shall be also ex- 
 cellence of standard, fine type, and tradition. To ar- 
 rive at these he needs the artist and the gentleman; 
 from both he may learn to appreciate the human 
 values. 
 
 With the Frankenstein of the British proletariat 
 behind the door, these things appear so far away as 
 to be Utopian. But the work of the great idealists of 
 the 19th century, though they themselves are si- 
 lent, is not yet done. It is the culture of the middle 
 classes that is in the making; it is there that the great 
 strength of Socialism must ultimately lie. That is 
 why one of the most valuable forces in English life 
 towards the building up of the Socialistic State is a 
 certain cultured English conservatism which we 
 
 56
 
 all admire- -representing, as it does, traditional 
 commonsense, level headedness, compromise, hon- 
 esty, and the manners and training of the past. In 
 the days when I lived at Toynbee Hall I took part 
 in a dialogue. My own share was rather that of a 
 listener, but I remember a passage-at-arms between 
 two young idealists fresh from college. The one 
 was a young aristocrat, proud, rightly if somewhat 
 archaically, of the tradition of his family; the other 
 was an enthusiast, a Socialist, red hot from the 
 Kelmscott meetings, experimenting in co-operative 
 and labour movements, and ready to give himself 
 away to any young workman who frankly asked his 
 sympathy and help. My two friends were discuss- 
 ing human values. They agreed in condemning the 
 bourgeois and commercial State in which the hu- 
 man values, the manners, the courtesy, the colour, 
 the joy, the chivalry, the loyalty, the corporate life, 
 in short the culture, had no longer a proper place 
 with reference to the daily occupations of men. 
 Each pointed to the past for his Ideal State. The 
 aristocrat to Penshurst in the days of Sir Philip 
 Sidney; the Socialist to the England of John Ball 
 as painted by Morris. "Well, after all," said the 
 Socialist, "it seems you and I want precisely the 
 same thing. We want the human values again, and 
 the corporate life." The aristocrat hesitated. " Yes, 
 we must have the human values, also the corporate 
 life; but I stipulate for the salt in the centre of the 
 table." " Oh," replied the Socialist, " I've no objec- 
 tion to the salt, if it's a fine piece of workmanship, 
 and you'll allow it to be passed about." 
 
 ^7
 
 And so it is that a wiser instinct will perchance 
 prompt the old Conservative party, the landed in- 
 terest in England, not to ally itself with the Radical, 
 the individualist, the power that makes for com- 
 mercialism in its latter-day developments; but to 
 adhere to its old traditions of sane government, of 
 wise standards, of differing values in the com- 
 munity, of holding property as a trust, of observing 
 the graded rights of labour which Toryism has al- 
 ways recognised — in short, to ally itself with Con- 
 structive Socialism. I look forward to the time 
 when the English workmen with their standard of 
 life will find their leaders among the English gen- 
 tlemen with their standard of honour. 
 Socialism & It is interesting to observe how the development of 
 t/ie Church Socialism has cast into the background the old Ra- 
 dical cry of the disestablishment of the Church. 
 We might almost ask: Is this instinctive? Once 
 again I return to my definition. I have called So- 
 cialism a Faith; and I venture to do this despite 
 biologists, economists, or bishops. The scientific 
 spirit which, since the Renaissance, has spoken to 
 us from the lips of Galileo, of Luther, of Newton, 
 of Goethe, of Darwin, of Huxley, has shown 
 us little by little, but ever with more light, two 
 things. It has shown us that revealed religion and 
 truth are not necessarily the same, and it has shown 
 us that for all men some form of religion, whether 
 revealed or not, is a necessity of life. 
 Most of us, unless Roman Catholics by descent, 
 owe our mental outlook, not perhaps in our own 
 generation, but in the generation of our fathers, to 
 
 S8
 
 Evangelicism, whether of the Church of England 
 or some form of Dissent matters little. What has 
 given us our moral and religious start in life, so to 
 speak, has been "Das Heilige Evangelium " of 
 Martin Luther, and compacted into one system or 
 another by Calvin, by John Knox, by the Germans, 
 by the Swiss, by the Dutch, by the Scots, and last, 
 unless we say first and include Wycklyffe, by the 
 English. Of us English the Gallic wit has said that 
 we are a nation of one sauce and many religions; 
 but the Gallic wit was deficient in power of psych- 
 ological analysis. For Protestantism is not so much 
 a religion as an attitude of mind, that starting with 
 the Bible as its basis, has always insisted upon the 
 right of personal interpretation in matters of faith, 
 g^" No pope, nor cardinalate, much less any bench 
 of Anglican bishops, shall make me think in any 
 particular way that does not commend itself to my 
 inner witness," says the Protestant ; " I may go 
 with you in this or that, I may concede a candle or 
 so on the altar, but I reserve the right of interpret- 
 ing the evangel to myself." Now follow the thought 
 a little further. Is not Evangelicism (this coming of 
 the Heilige Evangelium to each individual soul of 
 his own right, and his own interpretation) essen- 
 tially the religion of individualism. Society has 
 taken the form of its faith, or if we are sociologists, 
 we shall perhaps invert cause & effect. In any case 
 it is patent that the two go hand in hand. I am not 
 concerned with the various groups into which in- 
 dividuals, whether inside or outside the church, 
 form themselves. If they hold the Protestant atti- 
 
 59
 
 tude of mind, they must always, however sincere 
 their faith, "ha'e their doots aboot the meenister." 
 t^^Now, as I suggested before, Socialism, on the 
 side of economic theory, has, in this country at all 
 events, gone as far as it can go. It has ordered, ar- 
 ranged, and classified the bases of the new State: it 
 may have made errors; it will doubtless have to 
 make many modifications in the practical working 
 out; it may be far off its goal; it may, for reasons of 
 political expediency, never arrive at it; but for all 
 these shortcomings, there is in it a semblance of 
 logical, of terrible inevitability. What many feel, 
 however, is that in it all there is as yet no soul. 
 To those of us who still believe in the Church, the 
 question comes, in the face of Socialism, what is 
 she going to do ? There are two alternatives before 
 her. Frankly to throw in her lot with property, and 
 fight for her endowments, or herself to become the 
 vessel for that ethical force in which alone the new 
 State can live and move and have its being. There 
 are Socialists who believe that she will adopt the 
 second alternative, that she will revise her liturgy, 
 come into line with modern science, remodel her 
 system of private patronage, become again the 
 Church of the people, rather than what she is now, 
 the Church of the propertied classes. But it is a far 
 cry, and postulates two things: a frank acceptance 
 of modern science, and a purging of her ranks. In 
 short, what these Socialists rather hope for than 
 expect to see, is a new test — a test, not of doctrines 
 and beliefs, but of character; a test of the moral and 
 intellectual value of the English priesthood. There 
 60
 
 are Richard Whiteings in our own day, perhaps 
 more than we think. But can we test the moral 
 value of the clergy, I include the Dissenters, with- 
 out another dissolution of the monasteries ? Social- 
 ism, with the hand uplifted over property, stands 
 in its relation to the Church and the sects as Henry 
 the Eighth stood to the monasteries, guilds, and 
 chantries of the i6th century. 
 The proposition that I would now state is to my 
 thinking so remote as to be quite academic and 
 harmless; but suppose for a moment that the eco- 
 nomic basis of Church and Dissent were suddenly 
 removed in England. How many parsons and pas- 
 tors would continue to minister in poverty to their 
 congregations ? How many congregations would 
 have sufficient belief in the doctrines taught, and 
 the way of teaching them, to heroically put their 
 hands in their pockets and maintain the ministry? 
 We need but look around and size up our neigh- 
 bours and ourselves: our comfortable widow's mite 
 of Sabbatarian silver would not go very far, would 
 it ? A friend of mine, one of the finest types of Eng- 
 lish Socialist I ever knew, & who is at this moment 
 I believe ministering on the Leper's Island, said to 
 me that in his opinion for the salvation of modern 
 England one thing was necessary: a new order of 
 St. Francis — an order of poverty. 
 My proposition then — but it is a dream — is a bench 
 of bishops shrewd enough to see, wise enough to 
 know, that the Church is older than Christ; that 
 she has herself grown out of Paganism, & absorbed 
 and reformed its various systems. A bench of bi- 
 
 6i
 
 shops courageous enough to admit that science has 
 shifted the bases of truth: that indeed she has her- 
 self to absorb science, or science will absorb, nay 
 destroy her; and that her proper function, in the 
 light of science, is to define man's relation to the 
 universe, and the rule of his conduct, not alone as 
 she is too apt to interpret it, in the sense of his duty 
 to himself, his other-worldliness, but his duty to 
 his neighbour. A bench of bishops so wise might 
 yet make of the Church a spiritual power that 
 should vie with the English Church under Stephen 
 Langton or Hugh of Lincoln! — but the dream is 
 too fantastic ! 
 Socialism & A kindly Jesuit with whom not long ago I had a 
 the issue be- talk concerning the Church of England and the 
 tween Science Church of Rome in relation to the coming State 
 & Religion and the values of life, put it to me thus: "The 
 shaping of the new State rests with us, and for this 
 reason. Revelation is not in the Bible; revelation 
 is in the Church. The Church says: I was present 
 at His death, I was the witness; if there be a re- 
 vealed religion, I alone am its mouthpiece." "And 
 what if the witness err.? " "Ah," said he, shrugging 
 his shoulders, "if you cannot believe in revealed 
 religion, I can say no more." 
 Such a summing-up contains in a nutshell the pro- 
 blem that must present itself to the Socialist State. 
 The last issue must lie between science and revela- 
 tion. The Socialist State can only be set on a stable 
 basis by accepting and shaping itself to the slow in- 
 ductive lessons of science. The Church must do the 
 same. But the Church is wise: she has shifted her 
 62
 
 ground before. Not so very long ago she stood upon 
 the Isidorian decretals. She may shift her ground a- 
 gain. She might even, in the light of modern science, 
 say: "Before Christianity was, I am; my system 
 was devised for a certain epoch in the thought of 
 man, lo ! now I will change it." And that is where, 
 to my thinking, a national, an English Church 
 might come in. 
 
 One of the men who made in his own peculiar way 
 for the shaping of this new State of ours was the late 
 Bishop Creighton, that sweet, wise soul who played 
 with us undergraduates at Cambridge as a good- 
 natured mastiff might play with kittens. I remem- 
 ber once, when walking with him in the Grant- 
 chester meadows, he said," Forme to be an English 
 citizen should in itself postulate membership in 
 the national Church." And there was wisdom in 
 this, more far-seeing than that of any ordinary An- 
 glicanorDissenter,whosevisionislimited to points 
 of dogma or to squabbles about property or endow- 
 ments. "Ah, but," say his enemies," your Creighton 
 was always an Erastian." That may be as it may. 
 The Erastian heresy (there is a Byzantine sump- 
 tuousness in the application of so high-sounding a 
 phrase to modern conditions) changes form under 
 Socialism. Under Socialism the Church has a new 
 idea to reckon with. The old cries of disestablish- 
 mentand disendowment, so dear to the heart of the 
 Radical individualist, and inspired, no doubt, by 
 his particular interpretation of the evangel, must 
 all be reconsidered, revalued, & weighed again in 
 the scales of the Socialist State. 
 
 63
 
 The non- I said before that it was the human spirit that was 
 economic rebelling. One of the things that has impressed me 
 Socialism more than anything in life since the time I left col- 
 lege,has been the immense number of boys & young 
 men for whom, as society is now constituted, there 
 appears to be no use. I have had many hundreds 
 through my hands. And when I say no use, I do not 
 mean in the material sense, for of course they can 
 sweep crossings, run errands, mind machines ; I 
 mean in the higher,the finer, the imaginative sense. 
 Boys and men who have the makings of fine char- 
 acter, fine sportsmanship, fine thought. Men out 
 of whom might be struck, given the surroundings, 
 just a little of that spirit & joy & glory which we see 
 in the Pan Athenaic frieze or in Benozzo Gozzoli's 
 Ride of the Kings. If, as I hold, this spirit is in 
 modern life, and like the imprisoned Ariel, is but 
 pleading for release, what happens t It finds a vent 
 somewhere, for nothing will ever hold human im- 
 agination. Take from it the power of expressing it- 
 self in art and in drama, in beauty of form, colour, 
 joy — what happens ? what must happen } It be- 
 comes explosive. That is why there are so many 
 "positively dangerous" Socialists about. And yet 
 the commonplace Englishman will not see it. Let 
 them smash the windows in Pall Mall or burn 
 down half London, will they see it then 1 This ab- 
 sence of beauty and imagination in modern life is, 
 to my thinking, an indictment not only against the 
 modern structure of society, but also against that 
 materialistic form of its reconstruction which we 
 first came across in the Socialism of Mr. Edward 
 
 64
 
 Bellamy's ' Looking Backward,' the commonplace 
 Utopia of electric buttons. Rather than that, give 
 me the Crystal palace optimism of the fifties; and 
 let me live in glass and iron for the rest of my days. 
 0^ In short, the economic Socialism alone does 
 not suffice. The eye, the mind, the soul, needs 
 something more; and that is why at the outset I 
 ventured to define the term as a Faith. For the last 
 twenty-five years, with perhaps the single excep- 
 tion of Morris, unlesss we add Ruskin and Edward 
 Carpenter,the Socialist leaders have been planning, 
 arranging, ordering the economic bases of the new 
 State; but they have forgotten the soul. In my view 
 they have got as far as they will go in that direc- 
 tion ; room has now to be made for the other wants 
 by which we live, not the bread alone. Once again 
 this is where the great idealists of the 1 9th century 
 pass before to warn-us. Watts, the painter of ideas; 
 Arnold, with his gospel of sweetness and light ; 
 Carlyle, with the lesson of the French Revolution; 
 Ruskin, the 19th century Cassandra; Morris the 
 prophet. The new State, if it is to be, must come 
 to birth free of the materialism against which the 
 life-work of all these was a protest. In our search 
 for the new values we have to make room for the 
 other things by which we live; and we have to find 
 these things, like the Kingdom of Heaven of the 
 Christ, within ourselves. 
 
 Let me put it in the form of a parable. Imagine the 
 Delphic Sybil in Westminster Abbey, imagine 
 some veiled figure coming to us and saying: " I am 
 the religion of pity, I am the religion of beauty — 
 e 65
 
 choose now, which will you take ? But beware, for 
 the price of the one is imagination; the price of the 
 other is poverty. Should we not hesitate ? Should 
 we not, some of us, at least, in whom the spirit of 
 Greece and the poets weighs against the spirit of 
 Christand thesaints, say: "Give me imagination"? 
 Socialism, as it presents itself to the community in 
 our decade, is on the brink of choosing the religion 
 of pity. I want to see it saved from the economists; 
 I want to see a little more room left for the poets 
 and the artists; above all, and perhaps that is where 
 the poets and artists come in after all, I want to see 
 in the modern Socialist a little more of the spirit of 
 the Gospels. 
 
 But now let us follow the parable a little further, 
 and remember that though she is in Westminster, 
 she is the Delphic Sybil. Our political philosophy, 
 our science, shows us that it is not really necessary 
 for poverty to exist, just as it shows us that free 
 play, that liberty for the individual citizen where- 
 by he may develop such imagination as he has, is 
 necessary. We can stand before the veiled figure, 
 therefore, and decline to choose; or rather, we can 
 take both the gifts she offers without accepting her 
 alternatives. It is possible for us, in the light of 
 modern science, to say to her: We will take neither 
 your religion of pity nor your religion of beauty, 
 we will take what is best of both. 
 Once again perhaps the wit of Mr. Bernard Shaw 
 supplies the pleasing sting to our reflections: "If 
 your religion is worn out, scrap it and get another; 
 if your social system is worn out, scrap it and get 
 66
 
 another." Therefore, scrap your Declaration of In- 
 dependence; scrap the fiction of Liberte, Egalite, 
 Fraternite, painted on the portals of Notre Dame ; 
 and scrap theThirty-nine Articles — aye, even your 
 Apostles' Creed if need be — & get another. But at 
 the same time construct, & do this conservatively. 
 Destroy nothing, I fancy the Constructive Social- 
 ist to say, that is not demonstrably false and mis- 
 chievous; test everything, revalue everything, first 
 in the light of modern science, & then by the spirit 
 of ancient Greece and the spirit of the Gospels. 
 There are those to v^hom Socialism is a Faith, who Socialism as 
 can no longer believe in the old gods; but until these a faith: its 
 unbelievers are swept into the constructive ranks, limitations 
 we shall have no new State. The ideal may be pro- in national 
 claimed, but to be effectual it must be felt; beyond character 
 this any doctrinaire application is impossible, and 
 if it is to be carried out it must be subject to the 
 limitations of national character. It must be touch- 
 ed by the genius of the race, but also it must rever- 
 ence the character of the race. It must fight cheap 
 labour, stamp out the cheap commodity, destroy all 
 that cheapens racial character, strive for all of most 
 value in racial character. And what is this charac- 
 ter ? Can we diagnose it ? 
 
 " Oh, wad some power the giftie gie us 
 To see oursels as ithers see us." 
 
 And how do they see the Englishman ? Let us for 
 a moment hold up the glass which our latter-day 
 knowledge of history and the criticism of neigh- 
 bour nations has fashioned for us. 
 
 67
 
 The English are a power for good, but what a drab 
 and sorry affair would be a world of Englishmen ! 
 Ask the Celt. They are great organisers, but what 
 would be the value of their organisation without 
 the financial brain ? Ask the Jew. Their colonising 
 power in the last hundred years is the marvel of the 
 world,but what will the city-bred do single-handed 
 in Manitoba or on the veldt ? Ask the Scot, ask the 
 Boer. They hate unreality, the theatrical, the pose ; 
 yet they have created with one exception the great- 
 est drama of all time. They are practical, common- 
 place, & direct; yet they have produced the finest 
 poets, the most exquisite lyrists.The modern world 
 owes to them the conception of the gentleman, the 
 type of chivalry, honour, and straightforwardness; 
 and beforeothernations they stand as the hypocrite 
 among peoples. They are perpetually crying out 
 for peace, for progressive reform; and it has been 
 said of them that they have conquered half the 
 world in afit of absence of mind.They are the great- 
 est rulers since the Roman Cassars, but they are 
 powerless to clean up the filth of London or Liver- 
 pool ? They are fearless as the day ; but they tremble 
 to touch a vested interest, however mean. Is it pos- 
 sible for such a people to accept Socialism? I turn 
 to my definition and ask : Have I made it wide 
 enough ? 
 
 C. R. ASHBEE. 
 
 April, 1906. 
 
 68
 
 PRINTED AT THE ESSEX HOUSE PRESS, 
 CAMPDEN, GLOUCESTERSHIRE, 1906; 
 AND PUBLISHED BY MESSRS. BRIMLEY 
 JOHNSON & INCE, LTD., LONDON.
 
 Other Works by C. R. Ashbee which may be procured at the Essex 
 House Press, 1 6^ Brook Street, Bond Street, London, W. 
 
 £ J", d. 
 
 TRANSACTIONS OF THE GUILD AND 
 
 SCHOOL OF HANDICRAFT, 1889-90. - 7 6 
 
 FROM WHITECHAPEL TO CAMELOT. A 
 
 story, with illustrations by Roger Fry. - - 26 
 
 A MANUAL OF THE GUILD & SCHOOL 
 
 OF HANDICRAFT, 1 8gi - ---10 
 
 THE TREATISES OF BENVENUTO CEL- 
 LINI. Translated by C. R. Ashbee - - - I 15 o 
 
 THE TRINITY HOSPITAL IN MILE END, 
 
 with illustrations by Joseph Pennell, &c. - - i i o 
 
 TABLES OF THE ARTS AND CRAFTS of the 
 
 1 6th, 17th, and 1 8th centuries. _ _ _ 30 
 
 CHAPTERS IN WORKSHOP RECON- 
 STRUCTION AND CITIZENSHIP. - 50 
 
 AN ENDEAVOUR TOWARDS the TEACH- 
 ING OF JOHN RUSKIN & WM. MORRIS. I o 
 
 AMERICAN SHEAVES & ENGLISH SEED- 
 CORN. - - - - - - -IIOO 
 
 A REPORT TO THE NATIONAL TRUST 
 for Places of Historic Interest & Natural Beauty 
 of similar undertakings in the United States. - 10 6 
 
 THE MASQUE of the EDWARDS of ENG- 
 LAND, with drawings by Edith Harwood. 3 3 o 
 
 A KEY to the principal decorations in the Prayer 
 
 BookofKingEdwardVII. - - - - 2 6 
 
 A BIBLIOGRAPHY ofthe Essex House Press. - i o 
 
 REPORTS of the Campden School of Arts and 
 
 Craftsfor the years 1904, 1905, and 1906 each i o 
 
 THE LAST RECORDS OF A COTSWOLD 
 
 COMMUNITY. Drawings by Edmund New. 1 2 6 
 
 ECHOES FROM THE CITY OF THE SUN. 12 6 
 
 BOOK OF COTTAGES & LITTLE HOUSES, 
 
 with 70 illustrations of buildings by the author. 1 2 6 
 
 50 Special Essex House Press copies. - -150
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
 Los Angeles 
 
 This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. 
 
 
 ' 
 
 »H!TJ lO-UI^ 
 
 
 MAY 1 1 1987 
 
 '■■ 
 
 A 
 
 i 
 
 1 
 
 
 
 ... 
 
 
 
 RENtWAL S^v 
 LD URL nUW 
 
 MAV2 
 
 .B-uita 
 91973 
 
 
 ?^. 
 
 --■ 
 
 
 0- 
 
 
 
 Form L9-50m-4^Ql(B8994 
 
 r4)44:4
 
 'JF^rLr-. ;^J. 
 
 ffifffiSifil 
 
 '%' C)00 413 285 8 
 
 cU 
 
 3 1158 00811 1493
 
 \