THE SOCIAL HORIZON
 
 pinions of tfye 
 
 "Tins is a really admirable little work. We have read nothing 
 so fresh, so suggestive on the social problem for some time. It is 
 BO bright and clear and unconventional that any intelligent person 
 who reads it is likely to think more seriously and more intelligently 
 about that problem than he has done before. To say that a little 
 work of about 160 pages sets one thinking and stirs our better feel- 
 ings is high praise, and that praise we can unreservedly give to this 
 suggestive little work." Dally Chronicle, 
 
 " We have not for a long time read a book which has attracted 
 us more. It is one of those thoughtful works which set the reader 
 thinking, and that in a hopeful and earnest fashion, with a notion 
 that something may evolve itself from the ment:il labour." Jl'o/- 
 minster Review. 
 
 "Is of considerable present interest, and deserves to be widely 
 read and digested. A very keen-sighted book, which puts clearly 
 and forcibly what many are vaguely thinking, and what may, with 
 great advantage, be suggested to a far wider circle." Economic 
 Review. 
 
 " We may commend this little volume as an original treatise 
 well written and readable. The general line of argument is to 
 point to the facility with which public control might now be at- 
 tained over great branches of industry." Athenaeum. 
 
 "A sound argument in favour of the position that, through an 
 irresistible tendency, the small master, the small merchant, and the 
 small dealer, arc played out. Read, mark, learn, and inwardly 
 digest the book, is our advice to all readers." North British 
 Economist. 
 
 "He discusses with vigour and suggestiveness the forces which 
 are tending in modern England to the extinction of small businesses. 
 He has something which is both wise and wholesome to say in re- 
 gard to the social elevation of the people." Z.eeilf Mercury.
 
 THE SOCIAL HORIZON 
 
 THE AUTHOR OF 
 
 " LIFE IN OUR VILLAGES " 
 
 SECOND 
 
 EDITION 
 
 LONDON 
 SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO. 
 
 PATERNOSTER SQUARE 
 1893
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 THE writer is not identified, or in any way con- 
 nected, with any body of Socialists. He states 
 this, not, of course, because he feels that there 
 would be any discredit in such a connection, but 
 because he thinks it possible that some readers 
 may be disposed to give to what he has to say a 
 more impartial and unprejudiced consideration 
 if they know that as a fact. 
 
 He is not connected with the Socialists, nor is 
 he conscious of having been in any appreciable 
 degree influenced by Socialist writings ; indeed 
 he thinks it more than probable that if those 
 who are familiar with those writings do him the 
 honour of reading this book, they may have 
 little difficulty in concluding that, as a matter of 
 fact, he has not read much in this direction. 
 But as a London journalist he has been for 
 
 1458385
 
 iv PREFACE. 
 
 many yeurs kept face to face with the problems 
 of poverty and industrial strife, and he has en- 
 deavoured earnestly, and he thinks he may say 
 honestly, to see his way through them. He has 
 done his best to think the matter out for him- 
 self, and he is in hopes that the musings of an 
 independent and unbiased observer may afford 
 some assistance to those who are perplexed by 
 the movements of the time.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 LARGER AND LARGER BUSINESS SCHEMES . . I 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 FARMING IN THE FUTURE .... 15 
 
 CHAPTER II f. 
 ARE MEN THEN TO BECOME MERE MACHINES ? . 20 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 PRINCIPLES PRACTICALLY APPLIED ... 32 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 WHERE is THE MONEY TO COME FROM ? . . 48 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 AN UNANSWERABLE OBJECTION ... 65 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 Is IT DESIRABLE TO HAVE AN "INDEPENDENT" CLASS ? 61 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 THE CLASSES AND THE MASSES . , , 08
 
 viii CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 BUT THE SMALL INVESTOR -THE WIDOWS AND WEAK- 
 LINGS? ...... 77 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 WHAT ABOUT THE DIFFICULTY OF JOBBEKY AND 
 
 CORRUPTION ? ..... 87 
 
 CHAPTER XT. 
 
 PUBLIC WORK WELL DONE . . . 100 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 WILL IT EXTINGUISH " ENTERPRISE " 1 . . . 112 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 SMALL SHOPKEEPING ..... 125 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 PIONEERS OF ENTERPRISE .... 132 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 INVENTORS AND INVENTIONS .... 144 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 CONCLUSION . . . . . .156 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 A CHAPTER WITH THE CRITICS 164
 
 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 LARGER AND LARGER BUSINESS SCHEMES. 
 
 IF you look back along the commercial and industrial 
 history of this country, you will find that, broadly 
 speaking, it is the history of a stead} 7 , continuous, and 
 ever-accelerating tendency to larger schemes, to more 
 elaborate organisation, to closer and closer approxi- 
 mation to public control. I am not now, it must be 
 understood, alluding to enterprises of a purely trading 
 character, such as some of the great commercial com- 
 panies of times gone by, which were often the creation 
 of kingly power in the granting of monopolies, char- 
 ters, and so forth. I am alluding to commercial and 
 industrial affairs involving the employment of the 
 mass of the people. First you have every tradesman 
 manufacturing and trading for himself. Then, with 
 population increasing, and means of communication 
 developing, opportunities for business widen out till 
 they become too large for individual capital and man- 
 agement, and you see combinations into small trading 
 firms and joint-stock companies. Gradually you find
 
 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 such enterprises developing, organisations becoming 
 more intricate and extensive, and the powers they 
 acquire are found to be capable of seriously affecting 
 the rights of individuals and the welfare of the public. 
 Then Government steps in and lays down laws for 
 the regulation of such enterprise, prohibiting this, 
 moderating that, stipulating the other thing, interfer- 
 ing and controlling everywhere. 
 
 Every now and again there is a dismal wail of 
 protest and complaint against grandmotherly Govern- 
 ment. You are handicapping industry, you are scar- 
 ing away capital, you are interfering with the freedom 
 of contract and the liberty of the subject. But it is 
 all unavailing. Grandmother always gets her way. 
 Sooner or later the complainants invariably have to 
 yield, and public control is again and again asserted. 
 Larger interests, more elaborate organisations, a wider 
 circle of shareholders, greater and greater public con- 
 trol, until we have here amongst a hundred other 
 gigantic concerns a London and North-Western Rail- 
 way, with its 60,000 employe's, its annual budget of 
 ten millions of money, and its funded debt of a hun- 
 dred millions so close an approximation to a thing 
 of national creation and control that it might all be 
 taken over to-morrow without necessarily involving 
 the slightest practical change. 
 
 I am not at the present moment, you will perceive, 
 considering whether this tendency is good or bad. 
 I am simply noting an unquestionable movement 
 clearly discernible throughout our entire history, or, 
 at all events, throughout our recent history a move- 
 ment which of late years has become almost appalling
 
 LARGER AND LARGER BUSINESS SCHEMES. 
 
 in its accelerating rapidity. Everywhere and in every 
 department of commercial and manufacturing activity, 
 the tendency is to big businesses, to large operations, 
 to the building up of great machines. I think no 
 man of any knowledge of the world around him, and 
 of the history of his country, will deny this. 
 
 Now let me put this plain question : How are we 
 whether we believe that such matters are controlled 
 and directed by a personal Providence, or whether 
 we believe that they are subject simply to the blind 
 evolutionary forces that sweep onward with the steady 
 and resistless might of the ocean tide how are we to 
 regard this tendency ? Remember that it is not due 
 to any casual or temporary cause. It is not due to 
 any mere wrong-headedness of men of business. It 
 is not due to the prevalence of any vicious commer- 
 cial principle. It is not due even to voluntary choice 
 in many cases. It is a dominant, overmastering, irre- 
 sistible tendency of the times, due, in a great measure, 
 at least, to the increase of population, and to the 
 steady march of scientific discovery and mechanical^ 
 invention. With scientific discovery and mechanical 
 invention men are bound to go, and these forces are 
 rapidly taking industrial and commercial enterprise 
 out of the hands of small traders and manufacturers, 
 and transferring it to great organisations. 
 
 Just look around. A hundred years ago, stage- 
 coaches managed upon a system perfectly marvel- 
 lous to our great-grandfathers for swiftness, and 
 punctuality, and convenience stage-coaches, and 
 waggons, and carrier's carts in the hands of small 
 proprietors afforded the main travelling facilities all
 
 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 over the land. They have given way to vast railway 
 systems. Thirty years ago the rival 'buses of small 
 owners were plying all over London, and there was 
 no such thing as a large cab company, or a tram 
 company, or an underground railway. To-day, with 
 the exception of a part of the cabs and a small 
 number of the omnibuses, the whole business of 
 street passenger conveyance is in the hands of pro- 
 prietary bodies that may almost be numbered on our 
 fingers' ends, while all the allurements of speculation 
 and all the stress of competition are continually 
 suggesting amalgamation and combination are being 
 pushed in the direction of entire monopoly, that is, 
 and at the same time 'buses, and tramcars, and 
 cabs have all been placed under stringent public 
 regulations. 
 
 Again, within the memory of all of us parcel- 
 carrying was a business for small men. Not many 
 years ago the first of the great parcel companies came 
 upon the scene, and it appears but the other night 
 that I, as a journalist, was up at the General Post- 
 office to witness the sight presented there on the 
 occasion of the first despatch of parcels by public 
 machinery. It is the same in almost every direction. 
 Five-and-twenty years ago, the shoemaker's stall was 
 the place where boots and shoes were actually made. 
 To-day, for the great mass of people, they are made 
 in huge factories full of the clatter and rattle of 
 machinen T . Twenty years ago almost every milkman 
 who came to your door was a master man. He could 
 keep his cow where he pleased, and sell you as much 
 water in your milk as you were simple enough to
 
 LARGER AND LARGER BUSINESS SCHEMES. 5 
 
 take. Now, he must construct his cowsheds accord- 
 ing to Privy Council Orders, bis milk is subject to 
 Board of Trade inspection, and he himself is being 
 rapidly absorbed into huge centralised systems, one 
 of which and that I am assured by no means the 
 largest makes in 'London 60,000 calls a day with 
 ha'porths and pen'orths of milk. The meat trade is 
 going the same way. To say nothing of the vast 
 enterprises by which meat is poured into our markets 
 from Chicago and the River Plate, from Australia 
 and New Zealand, there are companies in Smithfield 
 owning butcher's shops in almost every town in the 
 kingdom. Even the army is much more of an organic 
 whole than it was fifty years ago. Lord Wolseley 
 will tell you that when lie entered the service, the 
 British array was merely a very loose aggregation 
 of autonomous regiments almost without any organ- 
 ised cohesion whatever. Many of those only now in 
 middle age can remember when the clothing of every 
 regiment rested absolutely with the colonel. The 
 colonel drew so much money for the clothing of so 
 many men, and he made the best bargain he could for 
 his country and himself with sweating contractors. 
 That system lasted until we went to war in the 
 Crimea, and then there was a dreadful scandal, and 
 the whole business was reorganised. The work is 
 now done for the whole of our infantry by a great 
 Government department, housed in a splendid factory 
 up at Pimlico, where the seamstresses are com- 
 fortably accommodated in a sort of Crystal Palace, 
 and where everything is done by machinery, even to 
 the cutting out of the garments and the pressing of
 
 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 the seams. Again, anyone who will go and inspect a 
 well-appointed modern laundry, such, for instance, as 
 ma}' be found in any London prison or workhouse, 
 will perceive at once that the very \vasherwomen in 
 our midst, are, as individual workers, as inevitably 
 doomed to disestablishment as though they were all 
 Archbishops of Canterbury. Turn to the grocery 
 business. You will find that beyond all question, 
 competition is keener there by far than it ever was. 
 Small grocers find it more and more difficult to hold 
 their ground. To make a given income, a grocer must 
 now do a much larger trade than he need have done 
 five-and-twenty years ago. There are stores to be 
 competed with, and great joint-stock concerns with 
 branches all over the kingdom. They buy largely, 
 get special terms, take advantage of discounts, and 
 are thus enabled to cut profits so fine that there is 
 simply no chance for small competitors. A man who 
 could formerly live comfortably on a trade of four or 
 five thousand a year must now do fifteen or twenty 
 thousand or he must soon shut up shop. For magni- 
 tude of scale, for organisation and methods of business, 
 and for smallness of profit on each transaction, some 
 of the stores and larger retail grocery businesses of 
 London and our other great centres of population 
 would, fifty years ago, have been among the wonders 
 of the world. To-day, these big concerns and their 
 splendid management are so familiar that we none of 
 us think anything of them, but they are, nevertheless, 
 quietly absorbing into themselves the greater part of 
 the business of distributing groceries, leaving every 
 year less and less room for small retail shops. I was
 
 LARGER AND LARGER BUSINESS SCHEMES. 
 
 recently discussing these matters with a much re- 
 spected member of Parliament, one of the largest 
 brewers in the kingdom. " Yes," he said, " there is no 
 doubt that it is so. We find just the same movement 
 in our business. We are bound to keep on taking 
 over houses and enlarging our operations. We don't 
 want to do so. We would rather not; but we are 
 obliged to do it." 
 
 Large businesses, highly-developed organisation, 
 that has been the tendency everywhere for a long 
 time past ; it is the tendency at this moment when, 
 remember, we are only just at the threshold of 
 the age of electricity, and may reasonably expect a 
 still further swiftening of our onrush in the same 
 direction. Precisely the same forces that are tending 
 to the. extinction of small businesses now and are com- 
 pelling men to combine in great operations, and large 
 and comprehensive schemes of business, will continue 
 to operate in the future, and the probability is that 
 they will continue to operate with a sort of compound 
 accumulation of effect, which at present we can but 
 faintly realise. 
 
 But even though there should be no acceleration 
 of the process, suppose this sort of thing should con- 
 tinue to go on merely as it has done in the past and is 
 doing now, what must be the inevitable effect ? The 
 inevitable course of things is as clear as the pathway 
 of the sun across the heavens. At present these big 
 businesses are thriving and expanding by absorbing 
 the profitable trade of the smaller concerns about 
 them. A little later on they will be grappling in 
 competition with each other. Of course, they are
 
 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 competing with each other now, but as time goes on 
 this competition will become keener and keener, and 
 by sheer stress of necessity they will be forced to 
 combine and amalgamate. At the present moment 
 there are but eighteen gunpowder manufacturing 
 firms in the kingdom, all of them, of course, large con- 
 cerns. Yet I was told the other day by the manager 
 of one of them that so keen was the competition for 
 business that in some departments of their trade their 
 capital hardly yielded them as much as they could 
 have got by investing in Consols. What is the obvi- 
 ous remedy? Is there any sort of backward move- 
 ment possible ? Of course there is not, and they can- 
 not long stand where they are. First, they will try 
 what can be done by forming a ring: As a matter of 
 fact they did try something of the sort the other day 
 met together and came to some understanding about 
 prices, but one or two of them broke faith with the 
 rest, and the thing collapsed. The ring having been 
 tried and found unsuccessful, or having been estab- 
 lished and found to work satisfactorily for a time, 
 must eventually suggest a still closer connection and 
 consolidation of interests, and amalgamation of capital 
 will b3 the final stage. In Germany the trade has 
 actually attained to this. The whole manufacturing 
 interest has combined in one great concern, and com- 
 plete monopoly has been established. 
 
 What has been the precise effect of this in Germany 
 I do not know, but it is quite obvious that the tend- 
 ency would be to raise the price of gunpowder, and, 
 clearly, if the same thing should one day be effected 
 in England, prices might be expected to go up here
 
 LARGER AND LARGER BUSINESS SCHEMES. 9 
 
 also. An increase in the prices would not, perhaps, 
 be absolutely necessary, because the saving effected 
 by amalgamation would largely increase the profits. 
 Indeed, in America the formation of great rings and 
 trusts has in some cases resulted in a decided lower- 
 ing of prices, so great has been the economy of work- 
 ing. The economy, however, has been obtained partly 
 by the wholesale dismissal of superfluous labour, and 
 the formation of monopolies clearly puts the com- 
 munity at the mercy of those who hold them. At 
 present these monopolies are comparatively young, 
 and those who have obtained them can hardly afford 
 to show all the power they have secured. Their 
 policy is to disarm hostility and to encourage confi- 
 dence. Let them get as old as the London gas and 
 water companies, and feel their position as strong, and 
 they would be just as ready to take full advantage of 
 their power, if only with the object of enhancing the 
 market-value at which they must be bought out. In 
 the case of gunpowder, the population at large would 
 not, perhaps, feel greatly aggrieved. But that very 
 process of extinction and combination, which in Ger- 
 many has resulted in establishing a monopoly in the 
 gunpowder trade, and has all but attained the s.une 
 thing here in England, is going on with the utmost 
 rapidity in the matter of meat, and milk, and grocery, 
 of boots, and shoes, and clothes, and books, and print- 
 ing, and railway travelling, and almost everything 
 else. They are all going that same way. I have 
 pointed out the fact that there are companies in 
 Smithfield with butchers' shops in every considerable 
 town in the kingdom. With their large capital and
 
 io THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 extensive business, I am told that wherever they have 
 set up in a town, the general effect has been to bring 
 down prices about twopence a pound. Even then, 
 one of them was for a time, I believe, able to pay a 
 dividend of eighteen per cent. While I arn writing 
 this page that company has just issued one of its 
 annual reports. It shows that they own over five 
 hundred shops. They have spent over a million of 
 money in the purchase of businesses and plant, con- 
 sisting mainly of refrigerating stores in different 
 towns, and refrigerating machinery in various large 
 steamers, in which they bring their enormous imports. 
 How is it possible for the ordinary butchers of pro- 
 vincial towns to stand their ground against such com- 
 petitors? The weaker ones must soon be snuffed out, 
 and those that are strong and able to be troublesome 
 are bought up, and, sooner or later, competition in 
 meat supply comes to an end. An organisation of 
 this sort is bound to push on to monopoly, because 
 without it they are always liable to find themselves 
 in the predicament in which the report I have re- 
 ferred to shows that this company is in. Not long 
 ago, as it has been said, they were paying eighteen 
 per cent. Last year, with all their capital, and all 
 their shops, and their plant, they made a loss of 
 70,000. Why was this ? Simply because the cost 
 of beef had gone up in America, from which they im- 
 ported; and owing to competition with other importers 
 and with rival retail dealers, they were unable to 
 raise their prices correspondingly in this country. 
 Just so long as there are two of them left to cut 
 against each other, so long will there be the strongest
 
 LARGER AND LARGER BUSINESS SCHEMES. II 
 
 possible inducement to try and crush out or buy up 
 the rival, or to amalgamate with him. This is pre- 
 cisely what is going on between the two great omni- 
 bus companies in London at this moment. Every- 
 body knows that for years past ruinous rivalry has 
 been maintained between the London General Omni- 
 bus Company and the Road Car Company. For a 
 long time it was a question of crushing out. The 
 Road Car Company were no sooner on the streets 
 than the others grappled with them in deadly com- 
 petition. They are said to have spent fabulous sums 
 of money in running omnibuses at a loss so as to ruin 
 their young rival. But the young rival has taken 
 more to ruin it than was calculated on, and the 
 General Omnibus Company has itself suffered most 
 seriously, and both bodies of shareholders are crying 
 out for truce. Here is an extract from a newspaper 
 report of the last meeting of the Road Car people. 
 The chairman said: "They had held their own during 
 the past half-year, and as to future prospects he said 
 they might benefit probably by an increase of fares 
 (applause). But that was a matter which did not 
 rest with the Board of the Car Company (ap- 
 plause). They had been ready to meet their rivals 
 and adjust the fares for a very long time past, but 
 the directors of the General Company had not yet 
 seen their way to do so (cries of ' They will'). He 
 hoped they would. Why the General Omnibus Com- 
 pany's accounts were not out he could not say. Per- 
 haps the directors could not decide who should be 
 sacrificed to the indignation of their own share- 
 holders. When the matter was settled, probably
 
 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 they would issue their report. Whether their rivals 
 were getting tired of the suicidal policy they pursued 
 he could not say, but he did think the shareholders of 
 the General Company were (applause). When the 
 shareholders of the General Company forced their 
 board to exercise common-sense, the directors of the 
 Road Car Company would be pleased to meet them, 
 and there might then be an adjustment of fares." A 
 shareholder said, " he should do his best to bring 
 about a reconciliation between the two companies. 
 He moved, ' That this meeting urges upon the 
 directors that a friendly conference be held with the 
 directors of the London General Omnibus Company 
 in order to bring about a rearrangement of fares for 
 the benefit of both companies and their shareholders." 
 Another shareholder seconded, and the resolution 
 was agreed to. 
 
 That is a near approach to a final stage, and some 
 day, though it may be a long time hence, the business 
 of our meat supply will be in very much the same 
 position. The public will find itself at the mercy of a 
 monopoly, and, of course, will be compelled to step in, 
 and, just as they have done in the London gas supply, 
 will stipulate for quality and limited dividends, and in 
 other ways secure the rights of consumers at large. 
 That is the last stage but one. Finally the public 
 will see that meat supply is a matter of vital interest 
 to everybody, just as they are now coming to regard 
 the water supply in London. It is everybody's busi- 
 ness, and it ought to be managed by the public and in 
 the interests of the public. If there were still all the 
 ramifications of 100,000 small private businesses to be
 
 LARGER AND LARGER BUSINESS SCHEMES. 13 
 
 dealt with, the task of extinguishing them and re- 
 organising the whole supply on a national basis would 
 be almost hopelessly impracticable. Nobody would 
 dare to propose it. But here you have a monopoly, 
 and all the machinery of a monopoly ready to your 
 hand, and already, to a very great extent, under your 
 control. When the movements actually going on 
 now have developed to that point, the final stage will 
 come easily and naturally. Society will feel that it 
 is not getting all the advantages it ought to do, will 
 quietly step in and assume complete control of this 
 section of its food supply, and we have made another 
 definite and irreversible step along the path towards 
 universal co-operation. 
 
 But how long will it take to bring this about ? 
 you may ask, perhaps. I cannot pretend to say. I 
 have taken the meat trade merely as an illustration, 
 and it may very possibly be that that would be one 
 of the very last to come under complete public con- 
 trol. I am pretty sure that if we each knew what 
 we have to pay for the long line of intermediary 
 agents between the man who fattens the bullock and 
 the butcher's boy who hands our sirloin down the 
 area steps, the meat trade would be one of the first. 
 But these things are hidden from us, and how long it 
 may be before any given trade shall have worked its 
 way up through the various stages of competition 
 into a complete social development must depend upon 
 innumerable contingencies that it is quite impossible 
 to gauge or calculate. What I am endeavouring to 
 show is that, in the ordinary working of business 
 competition, we have this tendency to monopoly, which
 
 I 4 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 is not only preparing our industrial affairs for public 
 control, but must eventually compel the public to 
 assert that control. In the very nature of competition 
 in business in the very principle which many 
 good people regard as the one vital and essential 
 feature of it, we find the germ of its own destruction 
 and extinction. The keener becomes competition the 
 more rapidly shall we move on towards monopolies, 
 and the very men who are pushing their business in 
 the most unscrupulous spirit of rivalry are those who 
 are playing fastest into the hands of the Socialists.
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 FARMING IN THE FUTURE. 
 
 THERE is one industry, which, it may occur to many 
 readers, appears to present an exception to the pre- 
 vailing rule discussed in the last chapter. I mean 
 the cultivation of the soil. The general drift of manu- 
 facturing and distributive enterprise in the direction 
 of large concerns seems too clear to be mistaken ; but 
 there are some facts which might be supposed to in- 
 dicate that agriculture, the largest and most important 
 of all our commercial interests, shows a strong tendency 
 in the other direction. One is continually hearing of 
 the advantages of la petite culture, and some, at least, 
 of these advantages are patent and obvious. Sismondi 
 and Mill, and many others, have urged, with great 
 force, the remarkable results of small landed pro- 
 prietorships in Switzerland and France, and other 
 parts of Europe, and, indeed, all over England allot- 
 ments and cottage gardens have been made to yield 
 crops that have been quoted throughout the length 
 and breadth of the land in illustration of the im- 
 measurable advantages of spade culture and individual 
 effort. If, as many persons contend, we cannot have 
 agriculture in a flourishing and satisfactory condition 
 until we get back to small holdings and single-handed 
 effort, why, we have here an exception of more
 
 1 6 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 vital importance than the rule we have been con- 
 sidering. 
 
 On the face of the matter, however, there are some 
 facts which are clearly not to be reconciled with the 
 supposition that farming will eventually be done on 
 the small culture system. For example, within the 
 recollection of us all, the scythe and the sickle, the 
 rake, the prong, the flail, and the brawny arms of 
 the peasant have all, to a very large extent, given 
 place to elaborate and costly machinery. The soil is 
 broken up, and seed is sown, and corn is cut and 
 bound and threshed, and potatoes are dug, and sheep 
 are sheared, and hay is made, and ricks are built all 
 by machinery. And, moreover, one sees that those 
 countries which have the largest cornfields, and em- 
 ploy the finest machinery, are the growers who have 
 been cutting our own farmers out of the market, and 
 it is evident that they have been able to do this partly, 
 at least, because of their extensive operations and 
 economical methods. These, I think, are facts quite 
 indisputable, and they might well lead any thought- 
 ful observer, even though he knew nothing of our 
 agricultural districts, to doubt very gravely whether 
 it could be at all likely that the agriculture of the 
 future could be carried on by small men on a system 
 of small holdings and individual effort. How is it 
 possible, he might ask himself, that this sort of enter- 
 prise could be carried on, except by large capital and 
 on an extensive scale ? 
 
 If you come to consider it from that point of view, it 
 seems improbable that small-scale farming can possibly 
 be the system of the future, and if you go into the
 
 FARMING IN THE FUTURE. 17 
 
 agricultural districts you will find, that, just as 
 in towns, small businesses are giving place to great 
 organisations, so in the country small farms are 
 being absorbed into great ones. Large farms, worked 
 with sufficient capital and the best machinery, and 
 under competent management, can be made to pay, 
 while small farmers are very generally retiring from 
 the contest more or less broken and beaten. This is 
 indisputably the case over a large part of rural England, 
 and judging from the causes assigned for it, there 
 can be little doubt that sooner or later this must be 
 the course of things throughout the country. I am 
 speaking now, it must be understood, of commercial 
 agriculture. I see not the slightest reason to believe 
 that the time will ever come when the cottager may 
 not find great advantage, as well as the healthiest of 
 all pleasures, in growing fruit, and flowers, and vege- 
 tables for his own consumption. I hope, and I believe, 
 that the householder's garden, and its pleasant and 
 useful industry, are never likely to be absorbed into 
 any great system. While a man keeps to the plot 
 of ground he can cultivate himself for the growing of 
 food for his own table, he is keeping well within safe 
 lines. He is more interested in it than anybody else 
 could be ; he is likely to find a pleasure in doing it well, 
 and to take a pride in getting the best results. No big 
 system can possibly beat him at this. But, as I have 
 said, elsewhere, the cottage cultivator of the soil "can- 
 not, in a general way, advantageously do more than raise 
 produce for his own consumption. This is well within 
 his own strength, and he is quite sure of his market. 
 The moment he steps out beyond this has to employ
 
 18 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 another man to help him, to interfere with his own 
 wage-earning, and to find a market for his produce 
 he is out in the great commercial world, subject to 
 its vicissitudes and fluctuations, needing capital and 
 experience and business knowledge." 
 
 It is this great commercial world that is being 
 rapidly sucked in to the swirling currents of force 
 that seem to be so mysteriously evolving systems and 
 organisations out of the chaos of individualism, and 
 
 o * 
 
 in these swirling currents our vast agricultural in- 
 dustry is being caught up just as inevitably and as 
 swiftly as the manufacturing and distributive activ- 
 ities of our great cities. At the present time every- 
 thing connected with the occupancy and use of land 
 in this country appears to be on the verge of great 
 changes, and what may be the outcome of our un- 
 settlement it would perhaps be rash to predict. It would 
 be especially rash to assume that while all other pro- 
 ductive industries are moving in the direction of large 
 systems, farming alone is going in the direction of 
 small ones. There are times, I suppose, when we all 
 of us feel inclined to deplore the changes that are 
 going on around us in the rural world. Deep down 
 in the consciousness of most of us there is a certain 
 sentiment of Conservatism which clings fondly to the 
 past, and is especially resentful of any innovation up- 
 on the time-honoured associations of the country. 
 But Providence, knowing well that the innovation of 
 one generation is the time-honoured association of 
 the next, deals with ruthless unconcern with these 
 little prejudices of ours. We hate the innovation ; we 
 protest against it j we insist on the superior advant-
 
 FARMING IN THE FUTURE. 19 
 
 ages of "spade industry" and small holdings and 
 we may even take practical measures for getting back 
 to the old order of things, but it is of no use fighting 
 against the influence of the stars in their courses, and 
 if we wish to see the world's future agricultural 
 system for the supply of the great staples of food, I 
 am afraid we shall have to look, not backward at the 
 pleasant cornfields of England, but forward to the great 
 wheat regions of Western America on the border- 
 lands of the Pacific, where the cultivation of grain 
 is carried on upon a gigantic scale and by means 
 of machinery which has quite eliminated all the poetry 
 of the cornfield and all the pleasant activities associated 
 with it. By such mechanism and by that alone 
 other things being equal can corn be got into the 
 market at the lowest figure, and all the wide world 
 over, whatever comes in competition with that system 
 will, sooner or later, go down before it as inevitably 
 as the stage coach has gone down before the railway. 
 What may be the future of English land, and the 
 system of the cultivation of it, for the next genera- 
 tion or two may be doubtful, but that the production 
 of the great staples of food for the people of all 
 civilised countries is going at present rapidly in the 
 same direction as all other productive industries, I 
 think there is every reason to believe.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 ARE MEN THEN TO BECOME MERE MACHINES? 
 
 BIG businesses, centralised organisations, public con- 
 trol that I repeat has been the tendency for a long 
 time past, it is the tendency at this moment when, as 
 I have said, we are only just at the threshold of the 
 age of electricity, and may reasonably expect a still 
 further acceleration of our onrush in the same 
 direction. 
 
 How, I ask again, are we to regard this ? Are we 
 mysteriously being led on pome false track ? Shall 
 we by and by have to bark back to some point at 
 which society first took a wrong turn and start 
 afresh ? Probably not. To some of us it seems 
 clear almost beyond the possibility of mistake. 
 " Order is Heaven's first law," as Pope says. We are 
 moving on in a grand evolution of a social and 
 industrial order out of a semi-barbarian chaos. The 
 talent for organisation, the power of organisation, the 
 appliances for organisation are everywhere being 
 rapidly evolved. In all directions people are being 
 forced to subordinate themselves to great systems, to 
 take their places according to their capacity as por- 
 tions of great machines. 
 
 But can it be that Providence, or Nature, or evolu- 
 tion, or whatever we may individually prefer to call 
 
 20
 
 ARE MEN TO BECOME AIERE MACHINES? 21 
 
 that mysterious power that is shaping our ends and 
 directing our course for us, often, as it would seem, in 
 the most ruthless disregard of our preferences and 
 opinions can it be that Providence intends that men 
 shall become mere fragments of machinery ? 
 
 Well, I take it that you cannot find any safer 
 method of speculating on the intentions of Providence 
 than by closely observing and studying the actual 
 doings of Providence through long periods of time, 
 and I have endeavoured to show some reason for 
 believing not only that Providence intends this, but 
 that Providence is actually doing this on a gigantic 
 scale and with ever-quickening power that the great 
 masses of mankind concerned in all our productive 
 and distributive activities are really becoming mere 
 cogs and wheels in great systems of human mechanism, 
 and the higher the civilisation the more vast and 
 elaborate the machinery, and the more puny and 
 impotent does the individual become. You may dis- 
 like these facts, but facts they are, and it is of no 
 use to shut your eyes to them. 
 
 Is Providence, then, actually crushing out human 
 individuality, and crippling, and fettering personal 
 freedom out of existence ? Nothing of the kind. On 
 the contrary, in this way, probably the only possible 
 way, there is being slowly wrought out a grand 
 scheme of human freedom and the fullest possible 
 scope for personal faculty. 
 
 Where we are apt to make a mistake in the con- 
 sideration of this subject, is in forgetting that in 
 any really satisfactory scheme of social life there 
 should always be not only a working-day in which
 
 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 every man may very advantageously to himself 
 submit to disciplinary restraint and organised co- 
 operation with his fellow-rnen, but also a large 
 margin of leisure time. 
 
 It is to leisure time after a fair day's work that 
 you must look for the exercise of freedom and the 
 development of individuality, so far, at least, as 
 regards the great mass of mankind. So far as the 
 vast majority of people are concerned, just consider 
 for a moment how utterly impossible it is that in 
 their work they can either be free in any important 
 sense, or can cultivate any of that personal faculty, 
 that individual talent, to the idea of which many of 
 our individualist friends cling with such infatuation. 
 Probably by far the larger number of people in Eng- 
 land to-day are performing merely mechanical acts. 
 An enormous proportion of them are simply watch- 
 ing and co-operating with machines. They are part 
 and parcel of their machines and must work with 
 them. With hundreds of thousands of people the 
 slightest assumption of freedom in their work, the 
 slightest play of individualit}", and there would be 
 instant mischief. Only the day before writing this 
 page, I was talking with the locomotive superinten- 
 dent of one of the great railways running out of 
 London, and the conversation turned on the men who 
 made the best engine-drivers. After twenty years' 
 experience he declared emphatically that the very 
 best engine-drivers w r ere those who were most 
 mechanical and unintelligent in their work. He 
 asserted his belief that it was a distinct disadvantage 
 for a man to bother his head about the internal
 
 ARE MEN TO BECOME MERE MACHINES? 2$ 
 
 mechanism of his engine. The very best men were 
 those who stuck to their rules and concentrated their 
 whole and undivided attention on doing just what 
 they were told to do. How far that may have been 
 a wise and discriminating judgment on the part of 
 this experienced superintendent as regards this parti- 
 cular class of men, the reader is as well able to judge 
 as I am. Brunei, the engineer of the Great Western 
 Kailway, implied the same thing when he said in 
 effect that he should have made a very poor loco- 
 motive driver. His thoughts would have been too 
 much taken up by his engine. Certainly, it is un- 
 questionably true that the gist of what the railway 
 superintendent said of his men might be applied to a 
 vast proportion of operatives throughout the country. 
 Stick by their rules, work by their patterns, do just as 
 they are told and all goes well. Exercise the slightest 
 degree of free will and there is mischief at once. An 
 act of individuality is the breaking of a cog, it is the 
 insertion of a pebble among the wheels. Not long 
 ago I was talking with the manager of one of the 
 great wholesale clothing-houses in London, on the 
 subject of the sweating system and the " middlemen." 
 Among other reasons why the middlemen could not 
 be dispensed with he gave me this. " Suppose," he 
 said, " we have an order for a hundred coats to 
 sample. We cannot give them out to fifty or a 
 hundred people, the actual workers of the gar- 
 ments. If we did we should have them brought in 
 made up in fifty or a hundred different ways. No 
 two workers would turn out their work exactly alike. 
 We are bound to hand them over to middlemen, whose
 
 24 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 business it is to ensure uniformity of work through- 
 out." There is a certain standard of work set up 
 and nobody must venture to depart from it. This 
 systematic repression of originality is observable 
 throughout by far the greater extent of manufactur- 
 ing England, and it is distinctly on the increase as 
 one function after another is taken up by machinery 
 or sub-divided among several hands. No doubt there 
 are many mechanical trades and employments which 
 do afford, and will always afford day by clay to those 
 engaged in them, a certain scope for the exercise of 
 judgment, and discretion, and versatility of skill. 
 But if you come to think of it if you take into 
 account all the mere hewers of wood and drawers of 
 water, all the mere labourers, all those who are work- 
 ing under direct personal control, all those whose 
 actions are dependent on the movements of machinery, 
 including all the factory hands in the kingdom, you 
 will undoubtedly find that the workers whose em- 
 ployment affords them any exercise of freedom, 
 any personal scope whatever, are really in a very 
 small minority. And even in the occupations which do 
 afford some little play for skill, how narrowly re- 
 stricted that play is. Take a bricklayer for instance, 
 or a stone mason, or a journeyman house-painter, or a 
 railway porter, or a clerk in a counting-house. How 
 extremely narrow is the limit within which they 
 may exercise any individuality of their own. 
 
 On this subject people talk and write as though the 
 work a man does for a living must always be the one 
 great all-absorbing interest of his life, and as they 
 cannot reconcile themselves to the idea of men with-
 
 ARE MEN TO BECOME MERE MACHINES? 25 
 
 out freedom, without some sort of play for their per- 
 sonal characteristics, they naturally shrink from the 
 idea that the daily work of life is becoming more and 
 more mechanical, and that men are becoming more and 
 more parts and parcels of great machines. The whole 
 of life, in their conception, is working for a living, 
 and men's whole being, or as much of it as mental 
 and physical endurance will permit, must always be 
 given up to a struggle for mere bread and butter. As 
 this, in their belief, must always be so, they have a 
 vague, feeble sort of notion that somehow a man's 
 work should be so arranged as to be consistent with 
 his personal freedom and his individuality of 
 character, and they dread the idea of Socialism, 
 because they see in its rigorous system the ab- 
 sorption of the individual into large masses, and 
 they fancy that by such means men must necessarily 
 be levelled down to abject uniformity. It is the merest 
 moonshine. In any final and satisfactory social order 
 no man's life should be wholly given up to making his 
 living, but for a considerable portion of his waking 
 existence every man may not only without injury, 
 but with positive benefit, bend his neck to some sorb 
 of yoke, to a fair share of some form or other of the 
 world's work, and he must submit to whatever con- 
 ditions render his labour most effective that is to 
 say, he must become embodied in the highest possible 
 organisation of his industry, and must perform his 
 part with the precision, the regularity, and the sub- 
 ordination of a machine. 
 
 Let it be clearly understood that I am speaking not 
 of all the world's work, but merely of its mercantile
 
 26 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 and manufacturing drudgery the great mass of the 
 world's uninteresting work One sometimes hears it 
 asked, " How far would you carry your organisation ? 
 Where are you going to stop ? Do you propose to 
 bring everybody and everything under this mechani- 
 cal regime ? " Most certainly not. There is obviously 
 a line beyond which this systematising and organisa- 
 tion, this drilling and subdivision, can by no possi- 
 bility ever be carried. The line is very undefined, 
 not by any means easily discernible, but nevertheless 
 al solutely impassable. On this side the line are all 
 sorts of manufacturing, producing, and distributing 
 agencies ; the more such work can be systematised and 
 organised the better. On the other side the line are 
 all the artistic, musical, literary, higher scientific, and 
 intellectual activities. You attempt to organise and 
 systematise in this department of the world's activi- 
 ties, and you simply annihilate. Personal individu- 
 ality is of the very essence of all genuine art cind litera- 
 ture and intellectuality. The moment you begin to 
 apply to these, merely manufacturing methods of 
 labour and production, the individuality vanishes, and 
 the one principle which gave your productions their 
 worth and interest has irretrievably gone. You have 
 lost your givat painter whose every successive work 
 has some fresh beauty, some more exquisite touch of 
 delicacy, some diviner manifestation of creative genius, 
 and you have got a machine whose endless iterations 
 and repetitions weary and repel you. You have lost 
 all the brightest and freshest and most original of 
 authorship, and you have got in its place an insipid 
 rechauffe of borrowed ideas mechanically pumped up
 
 ARE MEN TO BECOME MERE MACHINES'! 27 
 
 to order. You have lost your musician, and you have 
 set up your hurdy-gurdy. Where one may hope that 
 the advancing organisation of society will benefit art, 
 science, and literature, will not be in reducing their 
 devotees to any sort of systematic control, but in 
 arranging for them such circumstances as will render 
 them entirely free to develop to the utmost whatever 
 genius and originality there may be in them. Intel- 
 lectual work, as long as intellect endures, will find its 
 highest and fullest development in the completest free- 
 dom from all restraint, and it is just because I see that 
 the ultimate issue of developments now in progress 
 will be to give the fullest possible play to heart and 
 intellect for the whole community, that I fervently 
 believe in it. 
 
 It is the world's drudgery, and that alone, that is 
 being so highly organised, and massed, and econo- 
 mised. Sound wisdom and the plainest common 
 sense would suggest the expediency of this, and all 
 the tendencies of the industrial world are conspiring 
 to bring it about. That men are being drilled into 
 machines may seem very dreadful, and if you make 
 them nothing but machines it really is dreadful 
 enough. To think of people spending twelve, four- 
 teen, sixteen hours a day making nothing but button- 
 holes, or filling lucifer match-boxes, or diiving in the 
 rivets of boot soles, or starting and stopping a couple 
 of horses, is indeed horrible. But only let the hours 
 be short and the leisure abundant, and there is nothing 
 horrible about it. On the contrary, in all the 
 ordinary manufacturing and commercial affairs of 
 life, the more closely men approximate to machines
 
 28 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 X 
 
 and the more thoroughly they are systematised into 
 co-operation with men and machinery around them, the 
 better in every way. A man who toils is not the 
 more of a drudge because he toils as part of a great 
 system. A man who has to walk ten miles along a 
 dreary road will not find his way the wearier because 
 he marches in step with 500 other men. On the con- 
 trary, the way will be shorter and the labour less 
 irksome. Mechanical precision of duties, regularity 
 of functions, and association with large bodies of 
 toilers do not increase the severity of toil ; they dis- 
 tinctly tend to lighten it. Moreover, union is strength ; 
 system is economy. It is only by union and by 
 system that human forces can be fully effective. By 
 system, and unity, and organisation, you lighten and 
 mitigate drudgery, while you fetch out of it the utmost 
 it can possibly yield. At this moment the great bulk 
 of the world's work its commercial, its manufactur- 
 ing and distributive work is mere drudgery, and mere 
 drudgery the great bulk of it always will be, although 
 it should be carefully borne in mind that the triumphs 
 of science and mechanism in the past are pro- 
 bably utterly insignificant compared with what may 
 be expected in the future, and it is impossible to say 
 how much of this drudgery and toil may by and by 
 be undertaken by machinery. The vastly preponder- 
 ating mass of the working-classes of this country 
 have no more freedom in their daily work, no more 
 scope for the development of individuality of char- 
 acter, than the clanging and clattering machinery 
 with which they are co-operating. The only rational 
 way to discuss this question is to assume as a funda-
 
 ARE MEN TO BECOME MERE MACHINES? 
 
 mental fact that, as a rule, with comparatively very 
 few exceptions, the work by which people live is 
 more or less mechanical, more or less in the nature of 
 druclger} 7 , and that the only hope for evolving special 
 talents, for cal'ing forth the best that it is in every 
 man's power to make of himself, is not in the mere 
 myth of freedom and enterprise in his daily toil for a 
 living, but in obtaining fur him ample leisure, and the 
 means of advantageously employing it when his daily 
 task of work is done. 
 
 It is just this leisure time that the Providential 
 Government of the world seems to me to be prepar- 
 ing for the whole population by all the forces and 
 currents of the times. All this mechanism, all this 
 organisation, all this system simply means that we 
 are swiftly and surely developing a social order, in 
 which the drudgery of life shall be got through in 
 the easiest way and by the shortest methods. 
 
 By the revelations of science, by the astounding 
 advance of mechanism, and by the organisation of 
 human effort, the gradual evolution of society is pre- 
 paring to mitigate the drudgery of life and to shorten 
 to the utmost its necessary duration; thus,as I have said, 
 slowly working out a grand scheme of human freedom 
 and the fullest possible scope for personal faculty. 
 
 You remember some of you what a pasan of rejoic- 
 ing prophecy was raised when the sewing machine 
 was first announced to an almost incredulous world. 
 The song of the shirt was soon to become quite out of 
 date. 
 
 " Oh ! but to breathe the breath 
 
 Of the cowslip and primrose sweet !
 
 30 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 With the sky above my head, 
 And the grass beneath my feet ! 
 
 For only one short hour 
 To feel as I used to feel, 
 
 Before I knew the woes of want, 
 And the walk that costs a meal." 
 
 Well, these primrose walks were all to be enjoj^ed 
 again, for the sewing machines were going to do in 
 three hours or less what those weary fingers had 
 taken twelve to get through. The same amount of 
 necessary work would be done, and there would be 
 ample leisure for flowery walks and all the sweet 
 amenities of home life. What has become of that 
 bright vision ? The whole land is humming with 
 sewing machines, but what of the flowery walks and 
 the blue skies and the heart's ease ? Was it all a 
 mere poet's fancy ? No ; it is coming yet. Just look 
 around you and see what is actually going on. Here 
 you have industrial systems that men are building up 
 for themselves, and all unconscious of the part they 
 are playing in the grand procession of humanity ; 
 there you have the rush and roar of a printing press, 
 which, in its mechanical resources and its intellectual 
 and moral power, is quite new to this old world of 
 ours ; yonder you have school-houses and educational 
 systems such as the world hardly dreamed of a hun- 
 dred years ago. Everywhere electricity is binding 
 the earth together in one throbbing, pulsating entity ; 
 in all civilised nations you find democracy gathering 
 strength ; and high over all the din and tumult of 
 these transition times you have the very demagogues 
 in your streets proclaiming the Fatherhood of God
 
 ARE MEN TO BECOME MERE MACHINES? 31 
 
 and the brotherhood of man. Men are learning to 
 work in great organised systems ; great administra- 
 tive talents are being evolved and trained for jihe 
 management of these systems ; and meanwhile the 
 masses of the jjeople are gathering the fitness and the 
 power to rise up and assert their right to control 
 these vast industrial machines, no longer for individual 
 gains, but for the universal beneiit. This coming 
 reign of law, this age of peaceful, harmonious work- 
 ing is slowly dawning upon us, and we ought to find 
 in the light over the hill-tops, not the threatening 
 glow of incendiary fires, portending social ruin and 
 destruction, but the advent of a brighter and a better 
 day.
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 PRINCIPLES PRACTICALLY APPLIED. 
 
 ASSUMING then that the principle of public control is 
 a safe and sound one, let us look a little at the 
 practical application of it. 
 
 Just look around on society to-day, more especially 
 in London and our other great centres of population. 
 What a frightful struggle is this getting of a living 
 with the great body of the people ! Even in the case 
 of those who are not designated " the poor," what an 
 incessant grind is this business of just keeping body 
 and soul together, what ceaseless anxiety is involved 
 in just making both ends meet. We are apt to dis- 
 cuss this subject as though the actually unemployed 
 were the only people to be considered, and it is true, 
 of course, that the absolute lack of employment is the 
 most urgent symptom of industrial disorder ; but, 
 really, if one comes to look a little into the homes and 
 lives of those of our working population who are 
 more or less regularly employed, it becomes sadly 
 apparent that the problem to be solved is something 
 far greater than merely the setting to work of those 
 who are at present unemployed. Oh ! the hopeless, 
 monotonous dreariness of everyday existence in 
 lower London ! Oh ! the life-long tragedies that one 
 finds every here and there behind neat little parlour 
 
 32
 
 PRINCIPLES PRAC1ICALLY APPLIED. 33 
 
 window-blinds in the streets, where decent poverty 
 does its best to look respectable and prosperous ! I 
 have sometimes been out and about with missionaries, 
 and School Board officers, and others in my capacity 
 as a journalist, and I have gone home with no impres- 
 sion on my mind deeper than that of profound 
 wonder at "that mysterious dread of something after 
 death " that " puzzles the will " and keeps men and 
 women groaning and suffering on as they do, when, as 
 Hamlet says, they might their quietus make with a 
 bare bodkin. 
 
 " Oh ! but for one short hour ! 
 
 A respite however brief ! 
 No blessed leisure for love or hope, 
 But only time for grief ! " 
 
 That is the actual and the literal truth as regards the 
 
 o 
 
 lives of tens and hundieds of thousands of people in 
 London at this moment, and this is due not to any 
 lack of necessary work, but, to a terrible extent, at 
 least, to social conditions which permit and compel 
 people to grapple with each other in fierce competi- 
 tion for it. All competent observers with whom I 
 have talked on the subject seem to be agreed that 
 even as things stand there is really abundance of 
 work for everybody. The main difficulty is that one\ 
 person is doing two persons' work. Instead of two! 
 people doing eight hours' work a day, we have onel 
 person doing sixteen hours and the other doing none ) 
 at all. The life of one is a degrading slavery ; the ( 
 life of the other is a lingering death. If, as a com- ' 
 munity, we could lay a strong hand on any consider-
 
 34 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 able section of the people who are working too long, 
 and give their excess of work to the miserable 
 sufferers from want of any employment at all give 
 them all a fair day's work and a fair day's pay is 
 it not quite evident that we should have begun at 
 once to evolve order out of the chaos, to mitigate 
 suffering, to relieve our poor rates, and our charity 
 funds, and, in short, to solve this terrible social 
 riddle ? 
 
 Yes, yes, you say, it is easy enough to arrange a 
 fair day's work ; but what about the fair day's pay ? 
 How are you going to arrange that ? Well, wait a 
 little and we will come to that. In the meantime, 
 however, let me remind you that this very subject of 
 a better distribution of employment 1ms already been 
 fought out by one very large and important section 
 of the community. When modern Trade Unionism 
 began to be seriously discussed and practically at- 
 tempted, this very difficulty of wages was raised 
 among a great many others. It seemed so insuperable, 
 and on many other grounds the aims and objects of 
 Trade Unionists were deemed by all the orthodox 
 political economists of the day so impracticable, so 
 wrong-headed and mischievous, that no measures were 
 deemed too hard and high-handed for its suppression, 
 and the cruellest penal laws were defended and main- 
 tained against combinations of workmen. For genera- 
 tions the common law of the land had held it to be 
 a punishable offence for two men to agree that they 
 would not work for more than a certain number of 
 hours a day, nor for less than a certain rate of pay. 
 A man was at liberty to dispose of his own labour on
 
 
 PRINCIPLES PRACTICALL Y APPLIED. 35 
 
 such terms as he could make, but if he and another 
 agreed as to what those terms should be. they were 
 both, by that very fact of their having come to an 
 understanding, liable to fine and imprisonment. They 
 were guilty of a criminal conspiracy, and to enforce 
 and enlarge the scope of this common law nearly 
 forty Acts of Parliament had been passed at one time 
 or another. Where are those penal laws now, and 
 where are those orthodox philosophers who, within 
 living memory, foretold all kinds of national disasters 
 if these laws were abolished and workmen were to be 
 allowed to form unions ? And which of them is pre- 
 pared to come forward and seriously propose to put 
 down Trade Unions bj T Act of Parliament ? They 
 may believe, perhaps, that Trade Unionism is not all 
 gain, but which of them to-day would deliberately 
 propose to disorganise and break up all the Trade 
 Unions and once more let loose their members 
 in the pernicious competition in which the rest of the 
 industrial world is involved ? If that could be done, 
 who would not feel, notwithstanding some possible ad- 
 vantages, that on the whole it would be a step back to- 
 wards darkness and chaos ? On the other hand, if to- 
 morrow we could bring within the pale of Trade Union- 
 ism anothergreat section of the workingcommunity now 
 struggling in disorganised impotence against the cruel 
 operation of unrestricted competition if, for instance, 
 we could combine all the 'busmen, and trammen, and 
 cabmen in London into a union sufficiently strong 
 to put the men on a footing of fair equality in making 
 terms with their employers, who would not feel that 
 we had made a step forward ? It has been computed
 
 36 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 that, in one way and another, there must be in con- 
 nection with the tramways, omnibuses, and cab 
 services of London somewhere about 40,000 men 
 employed, and it is said probably with some ex- 
 aggeration that they very commonly work sixteen 
 hours a day. Mr. and Mrs. Reaney, the late Congre- 
 gational minister of Stepney, and his wife, brought 
 upon themselves a good deal of the odium certain to 
 attach to those who advocate radical reforms, by 
 vehemently contending that it was the duty of a 
 Christian community to put down this brutal state of 
 things. They contended that the public ought to 
 acquire these services, and to give these fathers of 
 families an opportunity of sometimes seeing the faces 
 of their own children when awake. Suppose that at 
 that time some few years ago when there was a terrible 
 outcry in London over the want of work this sug- 
 gestion had been adopted. Suppose that the public 
 had acquired on fair and reasonable terms the 'buses, 
 and trams, and cabs of London, and had organised 
 the whole of them as one great branch of the public 
 service, reducing the hours of labour by five-and- 
 twenty per cent. We will assume, for the sake of 
 argument, that 40,000 is the number of the men em- 
 ployed, and that their working hours are sixteen a 
 day. This is not precisely the fact ; the working 
 hours are not sixteen throughout, but they come 
 much nearer to that than is generally supposed. If 
 you accept some of the statements officially made on 
 behalf of the Tramways and 'Bus Companies, you 
 will get something much nearer twelve hours a day. 
 None of our men get more than thirteen hours,"
 
 PRINCIPLES PRACTICALL Y APPLIED. 37 
 
 proudly observed a tramway official to me when, a 
 year or two back, I was discussing with him some 
 of the points in dispute between the company 
 and its servants, and had incidentally referred to a 
 working-day of fifteen or sixteen hours, that some of 
 the men were reported to be regularly undergoing. 
 " None of our men get more than thirteen hours ! " 
 Just think of it. A man starts on his first journey 
 at seven in the morning, and he finishes his last 
 journey at ei^ht o'clock at night summer and winter, 
 wet and cold, all the year round stopping and 
 starting a tramcar, putting on or taking off the brake, 
 dealing out tickets, or pocketing pence. Think of 
 the dreary monotony of such a life. I found, however, 
 that only by managerial ingenuity could it be made 
 out that thirteen hours was the maximum working- 
 day. That was only the time the man was actually 
 on the car. Ten minutes or twenty minutes between 
 the journeys was not reckoned in his day. All the 
 little odds and ends of time required for getting his 
 supply of tickets, handing in cash, making reports of 
 accidents, waiting about the office for this, that, and 
 the other, none of these things were taken into account, 
 but only just the bare reckoning of the time table, 
 and of course no account was taken of the time a man 
 required for getting to his work and getting home 
 again. So that even where this proud boast could be 
 made, the man who turned out of home at a quarter 
 to seven in the morning could not expect to get back 
 again till between nine and ten at night, and that 
 week after week, month after month, year after year. 
 As to the cabmen of London, they are of course less
 
 38 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 regular. For the most part they have a certain sum 
 of money to make up for their cabs, and after that 
 what they take is their own. With good luck a man 
 may get moderate hours, but competition is such that 
 they are often compelled to be prowling about, as I 
 have had them express it to me, "pretty nigh all the 
 hours that God A'mighty makes." 
 
 Sixteen hours, taking trams and omnibuses and 
 cabs all round, is not so very far out as the working- 
 day, and we may adopt this figure for the sake of 
 argument. Suppose that we had reduced the work- 
 ing-day of these 40,000 men from sixteen hours to 
 twelve long enough in all conscience is it not a 
 mere matter of arithmetic that at one stroke we 
 should have found employment for 10,000 idle men, 
 probably representing not less than four or five times 
 that number of people, all of them suffering more or 
 less in body and soul from poverty ? Take the 
 40,000 men employed on the vehicles of London, or 
 in connection with them, reduce their hours of work 
 and increase their numbers to 50,000, put them into 
 comfortable uniforms, and set up another Government 
 factory for a thousand of the unemployed or the 
 overemployed and villainously underpaid seamstresses 
 of London to make the uniforms for those 50,000 men, 
 and you will immediately send a new life current 
 tingling through every vein of the community. 
 
 Oh ! yes, yes, you say ; that is all very fine ; but 
 there are all sorts of objections. Well, of course there 
 are ; we are going to look at some of them. But first 
 let us clearly realise what are the advantages we 
 have secured. We have taken 40,000 men out of a
 
 PRINCIPLES PR A CT1CALL Y APPLIED. 39 
 
 condition of virtual slavery and have made them 
 comparatively free men. We have still left them to 
 a day of twelve hours of hard work and exposure to 
 weather, but we have given them four hours a day 
 leisure time ; and under the same conditions we have 
 found work for 10,000 respectable unemployed men. 
 All these 50,000 men we have taken under our own 
 control, and if at any time we find that the conditions 
 of their labour are such as the public conscience 
 cannot approve, we can instantly apply the proper 
 remedy, and if by-and-by circumstances seem to 
 warrant it, their hours of labour may be gradually 
 reduced to the eight hours' normal day's work of the 
 Post-office and the police, the number of employe's 
 being correspondingly increased. All these 50,000 
 men will be as comfortably clad and as well fortified 
 against the weather as are the police of London. 
 Besides all this there will be a thousand people 
 or whatever number may be requisite for clothing 
 50,000 men taken out of the melee in the East End 
 or elsewhere, comfortably housed, fully and regularly 
 emplo} 7 ed, and fairly paid. 
 
 These are some of the advantages that you would 
 secure by the step I am advocating, or by any similar 
 measure; but they are by no means all. It is obvious 
 enough that if by limiting the working-hours of four 
 men you can find work for a fifth otherwise unem- 
 ployed, the whole community will be benefited by the 
 prosperity of this fifth man. He will soon be buying 
 furniture, and clothes, and food, and possibly reading 
 books and newspapers. It will take a part of another 
 man's time to supply his wants. For every unem-
 
 40 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 ployed man for whom you can find productive work, 
 }^ou set, as I have said before, a new life current 
 flowing in the industrial world, while you relieve 
 public burdens. You relieve the parish rates of the.r 
 liability to maintain that man; you tend to keep him 
 in health and out of the charity-supported hospitals, 
 and the money that in one form or other of public or 
 private benevolence found its way to him from those 
 who are better off, may go to buy pictures, to lay out 
 gardens, to purchase articles of dress, or in a thousand 
 other ways to make it good for trade, and to promote 
 the health and well-being of the community every 
 bit of it totally free from all taint of pauperism or 
 charity. Some of the objections are obvious enough, 
 especially the difficulty which the political economist 
 who may read this will, of course, perceive in connec- 
 tion with the " wage fund." As I have said, we are 
 going to consider the difficulties. But what I am 
 anxious to do for the moment is to make clear the 
 advantages that result from every step you can take 
 in this direction. You give leisure to those who are 
 over-employed ; you find work for those who are un- 
 employed ; you promote trade and relieve public 
 burdens ; you make men sturdy and independent ; 
 and you get rid of all the evils of pauperising charity, 
 by simply sweeping away all occasion for charity in 
 any form. 
 
 Of course there are objections, and if there were no 
 objections on the other side, possibly it might be wise 
 to let things alone. But are there none ? Once more 
 I say, look round on London. It has been computed 
 that every year in the Metropolis six millions of
 
 PRINCIPLES PKACT1CALL Y APPLIED. 41 
 
 money is poured out in one form or other of charity, 
 besides another two millions in Poor Law relief. 
 Just think of it! Eight millions of money in charity 
 on four or five millions of people, and it is said six 
 families out of every ten throughout the whole 
 Metropolis living, working, and sleeping, in one room, 
 while the latest information from the London School 
 Board, at the moment of writing, shows that in the 
 Board and voluntary schools, on the south of the 
 Thames, there are between ten and eleven thousand 
 starving children, who cannot bring even a penny a 
 day for a dinner. This number includes only children 
 actually attending school, and it does not include the 
 children of drunken and undeserving parents. It is 
 the result of a careful selection by teachers who know 
 the children and their home circumstances, and 
 recommend them for free dinners, because their 
 parents, with the best of intentions and the best of 
 efforts, cannot give them a good meal of food, though 
 it may be had for a penny. It should be understood 
 that on the south of the Thames there is only about 
 one-third of the population of London, so that, con- 
 sidering the number of children who cannot be got to 
 school, it looks to be extremely probable that the 
 estimate which some little time ago put down the 
 number of children in London in want of a single 
 good meal a day at 40,000 was well within the mark, 
 and I think it might be added that, taken as a whole, 
 they are the children of struggling and deserving 
 people. Are there no objections to a continuation of 
 that state of things ? 
 
 As I am writing the post brings me the Ninth
 
 42 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 Annual Report of the Board School Children Free 
 Dinner Fund, one of the most ably and temperately 
 written productions of the kind issued by any London 
 charity. It deals with a period during which there 
 has certainly been no exceptional distress. The 
 glimpses it affords into the Inferno of lower Lon- 
 don are only such as are always presented to those 
 who will take the trouble to look. Here is a passage 
 from a letter written by a school-mistress to the 
 secretary of the fund nothing exceptional revealed 
 in it merely an accurate delineation of a certain 
 stratum of life all around us : 
 
 " We are profoundly grateful to you for the bene- 
 fit the children have received and the help given to 
 the teachers. A large proportion of the parents of our 
 children are widows, or have husbands invalided from 
 accidents which have happened to them while at 
 work. The rest are dock labourers, costermongers, or 
 itinerant tinkers, etc. The mothers have often told 
 us that the children never have a dinner except what 
 they get at school ; the midday meal being a piece of 
 bread with dripping, cheap butter, or treacle spread 
 upon it sometimes there is no food at all. Not 
 many weeks ago two girls, a widow's children, came 
 to school having had one slice of bread between them 
 one morning, and no food at all till the afternoon of 
 the next day. I was then able to get them a good 
 meal through the kindness of your Society in giving 
 me help for such cases. Another delicate little girl, 
 quite barefooted, came shivering to school, though it 
 was not really cold, and on inquiry I found that she
 
 PRINCIPLES PRACTICALL Y APPLIED. 43 
 
 had had no food that morning, and very little the day 
 before. Another family of five little girls, whose 
 father earns Is. Gd. per day 'sometimes' by selling 
 wood in the streets, never get anything but bread or 
 a few potatoes at home. Their mother is a cripple. 
 I could multiply such instances, but I fear to write 
 too much. It is very touching sometimes to find the 
 children leaving a few spoonfuls of their dinner, de- 
 claring they cannot eat it all in their anxiety to be 
 allowed to take it home, and when told that the fuod 
 is not to be taken home, pleading that it is only a 
 very little for baby, who will not have anything but 
 a bit of bread. The change in the appearance of the 
 children is very noticeable after the dinners have 
 been going on for a short time; for while half-starved 
 children do not always become rapidly thin, they get 
 white, old-looking little faces and flabby flesh, that 
 tells plainer than words their want of proper food. 
 With regard to the help it is to the teachers, not only 
 from an educational point of view, for, of course, it is 
 almost impossible to really teach a hungry child, but 
 for the comfort it gives them to know that they are 
 not obliged to try .to force the poor little ones to give 
 their attention to lessons, while they can only think 
 of their hunger. It is most distressing work for the 
 teachers when they have, as we have often had, 
 children becoming faint, and in some cases actually 
 fainting for want of food." 
 
 Here is a list of half-a-dozen cases picked out from 
 a record sent by another teacher every item of the 
 most ordinary, commonplace description :
 
 44 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 " 1. Family in great need ; slack work. Father 
 lias sometimes two days' work, never more than three. 
 
 2. Father no work. ' I am ill now,' the mother 
 writes, ' or I would come up and see you/ 
 
 3. Father is an out-patient at the hospital, and 
 earns nothing. 
 
 4. Father met with a bad accident. 
 
 5. Father is ill, and no work when he is well enough 
 to do it. 
 
 6. Father has had no work lately. Mother sent the 
 children to school without breakfast, and came herself 
 to the school to bring them food she had since earned." 
 
 And here again is another merely a string of 
 cases of illness and accident, with the suffering com- 
 plicated and intensified by abject poverty and want 
 of work. Every pour street in London would afford 
 just such a list : 
 
 " 1. Two children in rags, wretched poverty and 
 need, but at school. Little girl asked where she lives, 
 replies, with a quiver on her lip, ' We've got no home/ 
 Family turned out for rent arrears. 
 
 2. Father in hospital. 
 
 3. Father only earns 12s. per week; children 
 delicate. 
 
 4. Father in consumption. 
 
 5. Father too ill to work ; famity in great need. 
 
 6. Mother ill with cancer ; very poor. Father has 
 had very little work from October, 1890, to February, 
 1891. 
 
 7. Father killed through an accident ; children in 
 great need.
 
 PRINCII'LES PR A CTICALL Y APPLIED. 45 
 
 8. Father, casual labourer, very poor ; five children. 
 
 9. Father ill with rheumatism, previously much 
 out of work ; mother very respectable, striving woman; 
 has a hard struggle to find food for four children. 
 
 10. Father, casual labourer, for a twelvemonth has 
 done very little work ; six children. 
 
 11. Father earns only 10s. per week the year round; 
 five children ; four go to school. 
 
 12. Father, casual labourer, long out of work; 
 respectable people. All pledged that can be from the 
 home." 
 
 Are there no objections to all this ? Few people at 
 all adequately realise the awful amount of poverty 
 in our midst. When Mr. Charles Booth's invaluable 
 work on the "Labour and Life of the People of London" 
 came out, there were many who found in it a great 
 deal that was comforting and satisfactory. Things 
 were very bad no doubt, but after all they were not 
 quite so appalling as some had made them out. There 
 were the people all set out in distinct masses, all 
 drawn up in ranks and definitely labelled. It was a 
 relief to know the worst, and to many it seemed that 
 after all the worst was not so bad as it had been 
 represented. But what was it that Mr. Booth had to 
 tell us ? Briefly, it was that of the very lowest class 
 largely made up of the criminal and disorderly there 
 were 376,000 people; that of the labouring and 
 casually employed those who live from hand to 
 mouth, and in a chronic condition of want there were 
 816,000 ; while of those who for all the purposes of 
 family life have to do with from eighteen shillings to
 
 46 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 a guinea a week there were nearly a million. Leav- 
 ing out the lowest class of all of course largely com- 
 posed of those who have sunk into it, because of the 
 terrible difficulty of living honestly and respectably- 
 just imagine if you can, 316,000 people living in a 
 condition of chronic want, struggling for the barest 
 existence, hungry and squalid, and harassed by all 
 the vicissitudes of the " casual labourer." 
 
 Are there no objections to all this ? A few weeks 
 of frost, some little dislocation of industry, some 
 exceptional depression of trade, and the amount of 
 suffering down in the lower industrial classes of Lon- 
 don is something unspeakably sad. For many years, 
 whenever the wail of the starving people has risen a 
 little higher than usual, it has been my lot to have to 
 go into the slums and alleys, and to depict something 
 of the condition of the poor. I have visited their 
 rooms, and listened to their tales of sorrow and suffer- 
 ing, and seen it all written in their haggard faces, and 
 in the squalor and destitution of their surroundings, 
 and I have come away sick at heart and positively 
 ashamed of the very modest comfort of my own home. 
 May it not be just possible that we may gradually 
 develop some better social and industrial system than 
 that under which any falling off from the highest 
 point of commercial prosperity plunges whole strata 
 of our population into such depths of destitution and 
 despair, and entails upon the rising generation all the 
 physical, moral, and mental mischiefs of chronic 
 starvation ? Is it not, I earnestly ask you, the 
 bounden duty of us all to be extremely careful that 
 we do not allow mere bogus objections to stand in the
 
 PRINCIPLES PR A C TIC ALL Y APPLIED. 4 7 
 
 way of any possible remedy for evils of so serious a 
 character ? "I didn't make the world, and I am not 
 responsible for it," said a country clergyman to me, 
 when discussing with him some of our social diffi- 
 culties. No, sir, you didn't make the world, and you 
 are not responsible for it. But if the power that did 
 make the world is manifestly working out under 
 your very eyes a grand scheme of social redemp- 
 tion for those suffering masses, and you in your wilful 
 blindness and culpable ignorance set up your puny 
 back to binder and obstruct it, if you do your best to 
 thwart and discredit movements which you have not 
 taken the trouble to understand, if you nurse your class 
 prejudices and defend your class privileges, and are 
 ever ready to stand forward as the upholder of things 
 as they are, and to oppose all efforts to put them as 
 they ought to be then, sir, I say you are responsible, 
 even though you didn't make the world. 
 
 For my own part I have thought over all the 
 objections I have met with, with all the earnestness 
 of which I am capable, and I don't believe there is 
 one of them that will hold water. But whether I am 
 right or wrong in this belief, bear in mind what I 
 have pointed out to you, that in spite of all the 
 objections you can raise, the current of the times is 
 sweeping you on in that direction with a force 
 which you cannot resist. This public control of 
 industry is coming ; you cannot effectively oppose 
 it. But you may indefinitely prolong the miseries of 
 the existing state of things, and you may bring about 
 social disturbances which a timely recognition of the 
 inevitable may avert.
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 WHERE IS THE MONEY TO COME FROM ? 
 
 Bui now let us look at some of the objections, only 
 let it be clearly understood that I am not presuming 
 or pretending to join issue with those old orthodox 
 political economists, whose social science is nothing 
 but the science of making money for the upper 
 classes. There are a good many of them about. In- 
 cidentally they will discuss the rights of the labouring 
 poor, the home lives of the masses, the length of the 
 working-day, and so forth, but only incidentally, and 
 in so far as a consideration of such matters bears on 
 the main subject how communities may become 
 wealthy. The main question with many economists 
 not the only question, but the main question is, 
 by what system of things can a community make the 
 greatest amount of wealth ? The answer to this is 
 clear, unmistakable, and, on the whole, absolutely 
 indisputable laissez faire. As far as you possibly 
 can, let the whole community compete freely with 
 each other. Some departments of business you will 
 find the State is almost compelled to take over such, 
 for instance, as the Post-office, the telegraphs, harbours 
 for shipping, and so forth ; but the State should not 
 do more than it can possibly help. Let the people 
 
 fight things out among themselves. The strong will 
 48
 
 WHERE IS THE MONEY TO COME PROM? 49 
 
 be sure to come to the top and take command of the 
 weak. These weaker ones will be pitted against 
 ench other, and under the stress of unlimited com- 
 petition they will be compelled to produce to the 
 utmost possible limits of their power, while their 
 consumption of what they produce will be the very 
 smallest they can possibly exist on. That is the old 
 orthodox political economy in a nutshell, and one 
 does not need a special education to see that upon the 
 whole it is unanswerable. As a means of producing 
 wealth for all but the actual workers it is simply 
 unrivalled, and it is not worth while disputing it, 
 even though here and there there are points that are 
 disputable. 
 
 If you want simply to make a wealthy aristocracy 
 that is undoubtedly the way to do it. Keep a clear 
 ring, let the people scramble together, take advant- 
 age of their greed and their necessities, their weak- 
 nesses, and their vices. Screw down their wages to the 
 lowest possible point, and extend their hours of 
 labour to the utmost limit. You will thus get the 
 greatest production at the smallest cost. No better 
 way of making a profit is conceivable. What is the 
 use of disputing about the merits of individualism ? 
 It is altogether unrivalled, Sweat the poor and grind 
 their faces, and accumulate wealth. Only let us have 
 no cant about it ; while we are consciously and 
 deliberately upholding this selfish and barbarous 
 system of money-making, and are refusing even so 
 much as candidly to consider the possibility of a 
 better system, let us indulge in no hypocritical 
 nonsense about the brotherhood of man. Vast 
 
 D
 
 50 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 masses of the poor are not our brothers ; they are our 
 slaves, our machines, our beasts of burden, our 
 " hands," our " sacrificed classes " but not our 
 brothers. 
 
 Those who advocate the puUic control of industry 
 do not exclusively concern themselves with the pro- 
 duction of wealth. They believe with more implicit 
 faith than some who profess to make it a special 
 article of their creed appear to do, that great riches 
 are not necessary to happiness. They hold that 
 healthy living is much more conducive to happiness 
 than vast wealth, and they believe that this is as true 
 of a nation as it is of an individual. Notwithstanding 
 the advantages of individualism, they contend that in 
 many waj 7 s it is frightfully wasteful, and that if all 
 men did a very moderate amount of useful work 
 there would be abundance of wealth. Whether there 
 would be a little more or a little less is of no material 
 importance. They would prefer that as a nation we 
 should, if necessary, though they do not for a 
 moment believe it is, make less wealth, if only it 
 could be more equably distributed. When, therefore, 
 by way of objection to socialist proposals, the old 
 orthodox economist comes forward with his scientific 
 demonstration that the proposed system will be Irss 
 productive, the answer of the Socialist is prompt and 
 decisive : " Be it so ; we are not concerned to pile up 
 the largest possible accumulation of wealth. We 
 refuse to accept even for the whole community profits 
 which are wrung out of the blood and sweat of over- 
 worked men and women ; much more will we refuse 
 to permit, if we can help it, such profits to be wrung
 
 WHERE IS THE MONEY TO COME FROM? 51 
 
 out for the benefit of private individuals, who 
 neither toil nor spin." 
 
 Now then to the objections. Says the reader, " It 
 is all very fine to talk of taking over the vehicular 
 traffic of London, reducing hours of labour and 
 putting on additional men from among the unem- 
 ployed. What about your ' wage fund ' ? When you 
 take on your 10,000 extra men, are you going to pay 
 them by reducing the wages of the other 40,000 ? " 
 No ; that would be curing one evil, overwork, by 
 substituting another, underpay. The cabmen and 
 busmen of London are by no means too well paid 
 " Then where will the money come from ? " The 
 money, of course, will come just as it does at present 
 Instead of paying wages to 40,000 men every week 
 we should pay 50,000, and, of course, there would 
 be less profit, and instead of going into the pockets 
 of private capitalists it would go into the public 
 exchequer. But are you sure you would have any 
 profit at all ? Possibly not. Let us assume for the 
 moment that there is nothing left for profit. We 
 have the public convenience of trains, 'buses, and cabs, 
 all over London, and we have secured comparatively 
 fair and satisfactory conditions of life for 50,000 men 
 and their families, 40,000 of whom were cruelly over- 
 worked, and 10,000 of whom were absolutely unem- 
 ployed, and, therefore, in some way or other living on 
 the rest of the community. Of course we were keep- 
 ing these 10,000 people and their families before, just 
 to the extent to which they were unemployed. They 
 consumed without producing. They were actually a 
 burden on the community. They were, many of
 
 52 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 them, degenerating into thieves, and loafers, and per- 
 manent paupers, and their children were following in 
 their footsteps. It is true that we are paying these 
 10,000 men perhaps 15,000 a week in wages, but 
 from the broad public point of view it is by no means 
 all loss of profit. We are paying this 15,000 a week 
 in honest wages, instead of, to a large extent, doling it 
 out in " charity," in poor rates and police rates, or hav- 
 ing it pilfered by theft. Now, if for the pennies, the 
 shillings and half-crowns, that Londoners pay for 
 travelling about the streets, we get the best possible 
 service of conveyances, and useful, regular employment 
 for a working section of the population, which, with 
 the men and their families, cannot fall far short of a 
 quarter of a million of people, if we make sure of 
 all this, we, as a community, may be tolerably in- 
 different to a small balance, or even a considerable 
 balance, on either side of the account. 
 
 Even assuming, then, that after paying the wages 
 of our 50,000 men we had no balance at all, and that 
 whenever vehicles and tramways wanted renewing 
 we had to resort to a general rate, there would 
 really be nothing very alarming the matter. The 
 ratepayers would get the benefit of gcod service, they 
 would have the satisfaction of knowing that their 
 servants were fairly treated, and that, as compared 
 with the old system, they were distributing 15,000 
 a week in the charitable provision of honest and 
 respectable labour. 
 
 But to assume that there would be no balance is of 
 course an absurdity. The public have now practically 
 a monopoly of the travelling services of London, since
 
 WHERE IS THE MONEY TO COME FROM? 53 
 
 they exercise the right of granting licences to all 
 vehicles plying for hire on the streets. With a 
 monopoly of the vehicular traffic of London, to assume 
 that the business could not be carried on at a profit 
 unless the employes throughout the services were 
 kept working unconscionable hours is manifestly pre- 
 posterous. If that were found to be the case it would 
 indicate something radically wrong, and the whole 
 system would have to be readjusted. In such a ser- 
 vice of the busy London public there would be prac- 
 tically any profit we cared to make, the limit being 
 prescribed only by the concessions we chose to make 
 to the public convenience. It would be a matter of 
 no very great labour to set forth an array of figures, 
 making out a financial case for such a scheme. But 
 such an array of figures is wholly unnecessary, be- 
 cause no common-sense business man would for a 
 moment doubt the perfect practicability of acquiring 
 all the interests vested in the passenger vehicles of 
 London on just and even generous terms, and running 
 them as a public concern and making a handsome pro- 
 fit out of it. Part of that profit it would of course 
 be quite practicable to devote to reducing the hours 
 of labour, and thus finding work for the unemployed. 
 Any surplus, after doing this, might go towards the 
 relief of rates, or it might be used to provide tram- 
 wfcfrs and 'buses and cabs in districts of London where 
 such a service could hardly be made to pa} 7 , just as 
 the Post-office carries its business into localities where 
 it cannot be made to yield a profit or even to be self- 
 supporting. 
 
 On the ground of practicability no reasonable
 
 54 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 objection can be raised to this mode of relieving 
 at anyrate one large section of our over-worked Lon- 
 don population, and finding useful work for a portion 
 of the unemployed. There are other objections to 
 the broad principle involved in all such schemes, 
 which we will look at presently.
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 AN UNANSWERABLE OBJECTION. 
 
 BUT here comes a body of gentlemen who have a 
 really valid objection, to which it may be just as well 
 to admit at once that no satisfactory answer can be 
 given. It is to be feared that it is quite insuperable. 
 These are the capitalists who have hitherto run our 
 vehicles for us. With some of them we have dealt on 
 terms clearly set forth in Acts of Parliament passed 
 before they had invested a penny in their undertak- 
 ings. These Acts laid down most explicitly the con- 
 ditions under which they would be permitted to con- 
 struct tram lines through the public streets, and speci- 
 fied the terms upon which the lines and everything 
 belonging to them might be acquired by the public at 
 the end of a given time. On these conditions these 
 gentlemen constructed their lines, but we have not 
 driven by any means a hard bargain with them. In 
 t iking over their lines we have interpreted the Acts 
 of Parliament as liberally as we could, and as for the 
 rest of these capitalists, we have taken into considera- 
 tion the money they have actually invented in their 
 trams and cabs and 'buses, we have reckoned the pro- 
 fit they have made and the profit they haven't made, 
 but ought to have done, the risks they have run, and 
 their future prospects, and we have made handsome 
 
 55
 
 56 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 allowance for the fact that we have taken over their 
 property, not because they wished to sell, but because 
 \ve wished to buy. We have taken all this into 
 account, and though we have not allowed them to 
 drive with us so iniquitous a bargain as we were foolish 
 en ugh to concede over the telegraphs for communi- 
 ties as well as individuals may profit by experience 
 we have dealt generously with them. Nevertheless, 
 their faces are all as long as though we had subjected 
 them to the most rascally fleecing. The poor men are 
 in real trouble. They have got back all their money 
 with usury, but they don't know what to do with it; 
 they can find no satisfactory investment for it, and as 
 a gentleman said to me the other day, " What is the 
 good of 20,000 to a man if he can't invest it ? " That 
 is the deplorable position in which these poor men 
 find themselves. This socialistic business is really too 
 bad after all. They find, they say, that it interferes 
 with private enterprise, it makes capital a drug in the 
 market, it reduces all to a dead level, it crushes out 
 individuality, and so on, and they darkly hint 
 that if we go further with this sort of thing they will 
 take their capital out of the country altogether. 
 What comfort can we possibly give them ? We can- 
 not deny their grievance, for it is beyond all question 
 a real one. They have got money, and they want to 
 live by setting somebody else to work with it. All 
 the philosophers, ever since the first glimmering of 
 political economy as a science, have assured them that 
 capitalists are the pillars of the community and the 
 benefactors of their race, and hitherto we have all of 
 us accepted this as indisputable truth. Nay, more
 
 AN UNANSWERABLE OBJECTION. 57 
 
 than this, during the more rudimentary stages of 
 society they have actually been the pillars of that 
 society entirely indispensable benefactors of their 
 race. It really must be very hard for them to realise 
 that the time has come when they are no longer re- 
 quired. But that is really the fact. 
 
 What can we say to them ? " Gentlemen, we are 
 very sorry to see so many deserving men wanting 
 employment (for their money), but we really have 
 no need for your services. As you are aware, our 
 credit is of the very best, our profits are large, and 
 we are ourselves accumulating capital so fast that 
 sooner or later we shall be compelled to extend our 
 business. Our customers, the public, you see, are more 
 thriving than they were formerly. We have made 
 an important reduction in the numbers of our unem- 
 ployed, there are fewer claims on charity, rates and 
 taxes are somewhat lighter, and there is more money 
 circulating. People can afford to ride where they 
 used to walk, and we have had very largely to extend 
 and improve accommodation. We have now sixpenny 
 cab rides, and tramways and 'bus lines are now 
 running into districts where they were never dreamed 
 of before. The number of our employe's has at least 
 doubled, to say nothing of the impetus given to the 
 building of vehicles, the laying down of trams, and 
 the making of uniforms. Some of our lines of course 
 do not pay, but then the public get the benefit of 
 them, and, notwithstanding this, the profits on the 
 whole are so handsome that we are deliberating as to 
 whether we shall increase the public accommodation 
 or set up some other department of public enterprise.
 
 58 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 The probability is that we may do both. We shall 
 want in either case a great many hands and a great 
 many heads. If you gentlemen, who have had prac- 
 tical business experience, will give us the benefit of 
 your services, we will make you as comfortable as we 
 can, but as to your capital it is really out of the ques- 
 tion ; we of course have no sort of need for it, and we 
 fear that, as you say, as public assumption of business 
 extends, as it is certain to do, the openings for capital 
 will become fewer and fewer." 
 
 Now the position of these unemployed capitalists 
 is well worthy of careful study, because it is just at 
 this point that the brunt of the battle between Social- 
 ism and Individualism will be fought. The simplest 
 of readers will not of course suppose that I mean that 
 any body of capitalists will find themselves in this 
 predicament as the result of a single measure such as 
 we have been considering ; but it must be perfectly 
 evident that every step in this direction tends directly 
 and powerfully to produce this result. Every field 
 of industrial and commercial activity occupied by the 
 public necessarily of course excludes private enterprise 
 and private capital. We shall have presently to look 
 a little closely into that matter of " private enter- 
 prise" to see if we can find what are its merits, 
 and how far there is any justification for the public 
 opinion which attaches such immense importance to 
 it. But whatever may be, or may not be, the merits 
 of private, as compared with public, enterprise, just in 
 proportion as public business extends, the field for 
 private activities must obviously become less, the u c es 
 for private capital will disappear, and people with
 
 AN UNANSWERABLE OBJECTION., 59 
 
 large accumulations of wealth will find it more and 
 more difficult, as this movement progresses, to discover 
 ways of investing money so as to bring in an income 
 without work. Sooner or later the man with half a 
 million of money will be compelled, poor fellow, either 
 to live on his capital and so nibble it away as long as 
 it will last, or else he will be compelled to do, as Mr. 
 Ruskin has so long and so vehemently insisted that it 
 is every man's duty to do to live not on interest of 
 investments in any shape or form, but by earning an 
 income at some sort of useful work. This is just 
 what some of us want to bring about, and it is just 
 what the capitalists do not want, and it is on this 
 ground that the battle will be fought. It is just be- 
 cause the investing classes of society perceive that 
 this must be the inevitable tendency of this public 
 enterprise that they so dread and hate the idea of it. 
 All other objections to it are either mere bogies that 
 resolve themselves into the sheet and broomstick when 
 they are scrutinised at close quarters, or else, as we 
 shall find some reason for believing presently, they 
 are objections which have been very real in times gone 
 \)y, but have become or are rapidly becoming obsolete. 
 But the capitalist's objection is a thoroughly well 
 founded one. He objects to this sort of thing, because 
 if that goes on there will be no such thing as invest- 
 ing wealth for an income. Every one who wants an 
 income will have to work for it. Everybody can see 
 that as regards the Post-office business there is no 
 footing at all for private capital. Nobody makes an 
 income out of the Post-office except the people who 
 actually do the postal work and those of course,
 
 60 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 who, having done their life's work, are pensioned. 
 Some of the workers get ten shillings a week, some 
 of them get 500 a year, and the Postmaster-General 
 gets 2500 a year, but they all work, and not a 
 capitalist in the kingdom makes five pounds a year 
 directly out of the whole business. 
 
 Now just in the same way that we have then taken 
 over the letter carrying and the parcel carrying and 
 the telegraphs, so of course we may, if we choose, 
 take over the street traffic, the gas supply, the water 
 supply, the railways, the bakeries, or the milk supply 
 of the public, and every step, while it may be made 
 to afford openings for large bodies of additional 
 workers of all grades, must inevitably thrust out of 
 their means of livelihood the comparatively small 
 body of those who are able to live by lending capital 
 for others to work with. Their capital simply will 
 not be needed. If they require an income they will 
 have to earn it.
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 IS IT DESIRABLE TO HAVE AN "INDEPENDENT" CLASS ? 
 
 Now the question of course must occur to every- 
 body Is this really desirable ? Is there no solid, 
 all-sufficient advantage in having what we call a 
 leisured class, a section of society entirely independent 
 of personal occupation and drawing and spending 
 large incomes entirely without work ? This is 
 a question which, it is to be hoped, many of us 
 at least are able to discuss without any spirit of 
 bitterness or rancorous animosity ; we are not 
 actuated by any feeling of envy, by any desire to 
 appropriate to ourselves any of the wealth or the ad- 
 vantages of the upper ten, nor do we look for social 
 reform because we ourselves begrudge others their 
 higher status and what appears to be their better 
 fortune. We want whatever is for the common good. 
 Is it for the common good that we shall take step 
 after step in the development of a social system which 
 must eventually extinguish all incomes not earned by 
 useful work ? 
 
 In considering this matter, it is important to bear 
 in mind that no very great change in this respect can 
 possibly come about very rapidly. It is not a matter 
 of years, but probably of generations. Socialism will 
 advance just as democratic power generally has ad- 
 
 61
 
 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 vanced step by step, point by point, won through 
 sore strain and struggle. Arrayed against it there are 
 now, and to a large extent there will continue to be, 
 all the powers of capital, most of the influence of the 
 press, all the interests of conservatism, of ecclesiastic- 
 ism, and established interests in every phase and 
 form, a great deal of what passes for the wisdom and 
 intelligence of the times, an almost invincille array 
 of fine old prejudices, and a whole world of obtusity 
 and dull stupidity. It is impossible that any move- 
 ment so opposed can make very rapid advance. Tho 
 danger is that, with all the help of those who are 
 clear-sighted enough to see in this movement the 
 rising light of a new day, and who have that enthus- 
 iasm for the general welfare, enabling them to rejoice 
 in it, the advance will be too slow to avert social dis- 
 turbance and trouble. Let no one apprehend that by 
 any socialistic measures at all within the bounds of 
 practicability, the owners of wealth are likely to find 
 themselves suddenly reduced to work for a living. 
 The difficulty of finding employment for money will, 
 undoubtedly, be increased by every such measure, but 
 the stress of such difficulty will come slowly, little by 
 little, while at the same time, be it remembered, little 
 by little the public service, and the greater general 
 prosperity will afford greater and greater scope for 
 all who wish to work. What I wish to convey is, that 
 we may put entirely from our minds any possible 
 contingency, that persons nurtured in wealth and 
 luxury and leisure may suddenly find themselves de- 
 prived of their incomes and reduced to the necessity 
 of finding work. Nothing of the kind is at all likely
 
 AN " INDEPENDENT" CLASS. 63 
 
 to happen. What may and undoubtedly will happen 
 is, that the capitalists of the next generation will find 
 themselves under greater difficulty in the profitable 
 investment of money than capitalists experience to- 
 day, and, therefore, under greater inducement to seek 
 assured income by some active and useful career. 
 
 What those careers may be is another point on 
 which it is important that we should be under no 
 misapprehension like];* to engender prejudices. The 
 matter is often discussed as though the desire thatevery- 
 body should work, and should live by his work, were 
 an altogether revolutionary one, calculated to entail un- 
 measured hardship and degradation on the aristocracy. 
 People talk and write as though, if Socialism were to 
 prevail, dukes might have to become draymen, and 
 duchesses to go to the washtub. All such notions are, 
 of course, very absurd. So long as the world lasts its 
 work will be, at least, as varied as it is now, and the 
 probability is thab it will become infinitely more so ; 
 and, as I have already pointed out, there is a line 
 beyond which no organisation, no direct public control 
 is within the bounds of possibility. So long as men 
 vary in character, in ability, in tastes, in birth, and 
 surroundings and fortuitous circumstances, a certain 
 adaptation of men for their work, and of work for 
 men must be inevitable. For the cultivated and the 
 refined, for those who are highly born and well-con- 
 nected, and who have the ability to make themselves 
 useful in any of the higher spheres of labour, those 
 spheres will always be easy of access. Assuming, then, 
 that men may always be engaged broadly speaking 
 in the employment I'or which socially and intellectually
 
 64 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 they are best fitted, why should anybody be exempt 
 from the necessity of doing something useful ? Are 
 there any better men under the sun than many of 
 those who are labouring as statesmen and public 
 servants, as college professors, as artists, and authors, 
 and journalists, as ministers and clergymen, as 
 engineers and doctors ? Have not horticulture, and 
 forestry, and farming, and science, and art, and 
 literature, all of them been largely indebted to the 
 exertions of men who, in every sense of the word, are 
 entitled to be regarded as the aristocracy ? Who are 
 those superior mortals for whom we are so mightily 
 anxious to secure perfect immunity from all earthly 
 toil ? What hardship would there be, what have we 
 to dread in the gradual approach of a social system 
 which should, little by little, force into the ranks of 
 some of these useful workers all who are now living 
 on the work of other people, including a vast number 
 of drones, existing for nothing but to kill time, to 
 pander to their own petty amusements, and often to 
 their highly cultivated vices ? If we, as a society, 
 can see our way to the gradual development of a 
 system which will give useful and honourable work 
 to tens of thousands of starving people, will improve 
 the social condition of the whole working-class, and 
 promote the general welfare of the whole community, 
 why should we be deterred for an instant by any con- 
 sideration for the comparatively small body of people 
 who might possibly at some remote future be com- 
 pelled, by the ultimate working out of this system, to 
 make themselves useful in the world ? 
 
 But in fact no reasonable person would be deterred
 
 AN " INDEPENDENT" CLASS. 65 
 
 by any tenderness for the wealthy drones of society 
 if the drones themselves were alone concerned. The 
 truth is, everybody can perceive that these inonied 
 idlers are at present among the best patrons of the 
 working community, because they spend money. 
 They buy pictures, and they build houses, and 
 decorate them with the costliest furniture ; they set 
 up yachts and carriages, and lay out gardens, and 
 array themselves in clothes of extravagant cost. 
 They make it good for trade. Take away or reduce 
 the incomes they derive from investment and what 
 becomes of your carriage builders and your artists, 
 your cabinetmakers and upholsterers, your tailors 
 and milliners ? "What becomes of trade ? 
 
 It altogether depends, of course, upon how you take 
 their incomes away, and what becomes of the incomes 
 when you have taken them. If you simply destroy 
 their incomes if you take wealth and throw it into 
 the bottom of the sea, no doubt you will make it bad 
 for all parties concerned. But we have been sup- 
 posing -just for the sake of illustration that the 
 public take over the trams, omnibuses, and cabs of 
 London and work them themselves. It is perfectly 
 true that by doing that you will prevent any capitalist 
 making an income out of these services; but those 
 incomes are not destroyed ; they are only diverted 
 into other channels. If, in order to reduce the hours 
 of labour, you have taken on 10,000 additional men, 
 part at least of those incomes will go into the pockets 
 of these men, and the rest of it will go into the public 
 exchequer for the relief of rates and taxes, or for 
 
 public work in some other direction. You divert it 
 
 E
 
 66 THE SOCIAL HORlZOtf. 
 
 from the pockets of the non-working wealthy, and 
 you have put into the pockets of those who are only 
 too glad to work for it. You do, indeed, make some 
 disturbance of trade. For a time, at least, you alter 
 the character of it, but it is not one whit the less. 
 There is just as much business done, and just as much 
 money spent, but it is spent in a different way and 
 by different people. 
 
 For every large, unearned income you thus cut off, 
 you provide a hundred small, well-earned incomes. 
 You stop the production of the luxuries of life in 
 which the one large income would have been spent, 
 and you set going the production of all sorts of com- 
 forts and necessaries which the hundred small incomes 
 go to provide. At the West End of town there is one 
 person the less who can decorate his gilded saloons 
 with the costliest of furniture, can live on the 
 daintiest of fare, and spend his whole existence in the 
 pursuit of pleasure ; and in the East there are a 
 hundred families enabled to provide their one or two 
 rooms with the furniture absolutely essential to com- 
 fort and decency, to procure a sufficiency of food, and 
 to enjoy some little daily respite from toil. Now 
 this, I venture to affirm, is precisely what we want 
 somewhat less ease and luxury in the West, and 
 greater comfort and decency in the East. Do not for 
 a moment let me be understood to undervalue the 
 luxuries of life. We want all the beautiful houses, 
 all the costly works of art we can get to purify and 
 elevate our life's ideals ; we want the aid of all the 
 arts and sciences to make this world and all that is 
 in it as beautiful as it can be made. But but, when
 
 AN " INDEPENDENT" CLASS. 67 
 
 it becomes a question, clear and distinct, shall we, as 
 a community, go on piling up wealth and accumu- 
 lating magnificence for the benefit of a few at one 
 end of the social scale, while at the other whole masses 
 of people are steeped to the lips in poverty, degradation, 
 and unspeakable wretchedness, then be}*ond all doubt 
 the answer that we should all of us ring out with 
 earnest emphasis is " Not if it can be made reason- 
 ably clear that it is in human power to prevent it."
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 THE CLASSES AND THE MASSES. 
 
 LET us honestly face this matter. It is not worth 
 while to disguise the fact that if we take step after 
 step in the direction of public control of the activities 
 of the people, competition among investors of money 
 will become keener, and a good many large incomes 
 will be apt to dwindle and dwindle. A good many 
 people who have spent large incomes freely will find 
 themselves bereft of their power of spending as the 
 result of every step ; and there are certain branches 
 of business very likely for a time to experience a 
 certain degree of checking and depression in conse- 
 quence. You can never exercise the slightest inter- 
 ference in commercial matters without detriment to 
 some section of trade, however desirable and beneficial 
 your action may be in other directions. Bear in 
 mind that, as I have said, the movement will be slow 
 and gradual, but the tendency of that movement for 
 a time will be to check the expansion in the pro- 
 duction of all forms of luxury for the wealthy, and 
 to give a great expansion to the production of things 
 in demand by working people, and it may seem, to the 
 superficial observer, that the movement must be a 
 backward one. Society at large may appear to be 
 undergoing a process of deterioration. For instance, 
 
 68
 
 THE CLASSES AND THE MASSES. 69 
 
 it may be that the building of handsome and luxurious 
 carriages may be checked somewhat. The number of 
 people who can afford such things will not go on 
 increasing and multiplying as they have done of late 
 years. On the other hand, the increase of employ- 
 ment among the work ing- classes will enable them to 
 ride when they have been compelled to walk, and a 
 great increase in the number of vulgar tramcars and 
 ugly omnibuses may be expected. In a hundred ways 
 the same influence may be perceptible. Artists may 
 experience greater difficulty in finding customers who 
 can give five thousand pounds for a picture, while, on 
 the other hand, the sale of cheap coloured prints for 
 the decoration of working-class homes will be im- 
 mensely increased. There will be fewer persons who 
 can give a hundred guineas for a pair of window cur- 
 tains, and a great many more who will think themselves 
 exceedingly smart with a pair at seven and sixpence. 
 It looks as though you are setting up a current antago- 
 nistic to all the higher forms of art and manufacture, 
 and you think, it may be, that you have only to carry 
 your current far enough in that direction and all that 
 is artistic and elegant and refined will disappear, and 
 the whole country will become democratised and 
 vulgarised. 
 
 You may be quite sure, however, that in the long 
 run you cannot more effectually promote the interests 
 of art and science, and all forms of trade and manu- 
 facture, than by promoting the real prosperity of the 
 great masses of the people ; and this is true now to an 
 infinitely greater extent than it has ever been before. 
 In all our great towns, at least, there are now edu-
 
 70 THE SOCIAL HORIZON, 
 
 eating, refining, elevating influences at work which 
 are producing an immense effect, and which would 
 exert incalculably greater power, but that so vast a 
 proportion of the population are under conditions of 
 life and labour that entirely exclude them from all 
 participation in them. Churches, chapels, lecture- 
 rooms, reading-rooms, libraries, concert-halls, theatres, 
 public gardens, picture galleries, museums, exhibitions, 
 all have their influence, and together constitute an 
 immense power for the mental and moral progress of 
 the whole community. Give starving families work, 
 give mental ease and a comfortable sense of security 
 to the harassed and worried, and give to the over- 
 worked a reasonable amount of leisure, and in the 
 midst of such forces as we have now at work it will 
 take only a comparatively short time to effect the 
 most marvellous transformation in the whole tone 
 and character of society. Give them full play, and 
 the forces I refer to will produce an immense effect 
 even on the adult population ; and if you add to these 
 forces the day and Sunday schools, the evening classes, 
 the institutions such as the Polytechnic, the Birkbeck, 
 the People's Palace, and the thousand and one other 
 institutions for the benefit of the younger part of 
 the population, you form altogether an educational 
 machinery such as the world never saw before. Let 
 anyone go through the metropolis and become fairly 
 well acquainted with what is being done for the 
 mental and moral improvement of young London, and 
 if he possess the smallest modicum of imaginative 
 power to enable him to look a little ahead, he will 
 readily perceive that these " masses," as we are ac-
 
 THE CLASSES AND THE MASSES. 71 
 
 customed to term the vast majority of our fellow- 
 citizens, are really being rapidly prepared to take the 
 places of these aristocratic idlers, who have hitherto 
 been the best patrons of all that is superior in art 
 and science and manufacture. The evening classes 
 of London would alone be sufficient to rejoice the 
 heart of any but the most hopeless of misanthropes. 
 By the hundred thousand you are turning out young 
 citizens with tastes and aims and characters and 
 accomplishments totally different from anything at all 
 within the conception of the generality of even the 
 well educated among our grandfathers. They are 
 learning music acquiring just the taste that has put 
 into middle-class homes pianos, and harmoniums, and 
 organs, and has given rise to public concerts which 
 three or four generations ago were absolutely unknown. 
 They are learning to draw and to paint and to model 
 in clay, getting the elements of that art which within 
 the memory of many of us has so transformed middle - 
 class homes, and called into existence a whole world 
 of art industry not even dreamed of at the beginning 
 of the present century. They are deep in the study 
 of botany and chemistry, of astronomy and physiology, 
 and all the sciences which bear on the arts and crafts 
 of life, thus bringing themselves within the range of 
 these mental influences which are as antagonistic to 
 the " tap-room " and all its associations as light is 
 antagonistic to darkness. You are, in short, prepar- 
 ing a population which, if they can only secure fairly 
 favourable conditions of life and labour, will by and 
 by be making demands on art, and science, and 
 trade, and manufacture a thousand times greater than
 
 72 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 any you are likely to disturb by putting industry 
 on a broad and healthy footing. By the industrial 
 changes of which we have been speaking, you may 
 possibly have put it out of the power of here and 
 there an individual to pay a couple of guineas for a 
 box at the opera, but among the working population 
 you will have multiplied a hundredfold the number 
 of those who can pay a shilling for a good concert. 
 Which is best, from the broad public point of view, 
 that one man shall be able to drive up in his carriage 
 and pair and pay his couple of guineas for his music, 
 or that a hundred working-men shall ride on a penny 
 'bus and pay a shilling apiece for that same per- 
 formance ? Which is healthiest for the community? 
 Which promotes the greatest happiness ? Which is 
 best for the musical artist, or most likely to promote 
 and encourage musical art ? By the changes referred 
 to, you may possibly put it out of the power of an 
 individual here and there to buy a grand piano at two 
 hundred and fifty guineas for his own drawing-room ; 
 but for every such case you will have put it in the 
 power of a hundred respectable, intelligent working- 
 class families, by a little care and thrift, to acquire 
 some sort of an instrument for enjoyment in the 
 home. Which is best for the community, for indi- 
 vidual happiness, for trading and manufacturing 
 interests, that My Lord Tom Noddy shall patronise 
 the music -shop for a two-hundred-and-fifty-guinea 
 piano, or that a hundred families shall be enabled to 
 spend five, ten, or twenty pounds for an instrument that 
 shall lead the anthem, or the part song, or the children's 
 dance in the home circle when the day's work is over?
 
 THE CLASSES AND THE MASSES. 73 
 
 Remember that these young people whom on all 
 hands your institutions are training up with artistic 
 and scientific and literary tastes are by and by to 
 become not only the payers of rates and taxes, but 
 the voters, who will control the disposal of them. 
 By social changes you may possibly here and there 
 bring down an unduly big income to a point at which 
 there may be some difficulty in paying five or ten 
 thousand pounds for a picture; but here are these future 
 payers of rates and taxes becoming qualified to under- 
 stand and appreciate works of art, and to take an 
 intelligent pleasure in them. Slowly, no doubt, but 
 very effectually, you are bringing them in vast numbers 
 over to the public patronage of art and general culture 
 in all its phases and forms. They may never be able 
 to buy expensive pictures for the decoration of their 
 own walls, but, depend upon it, they will soon be 
 voting for local picture galleries, and for the em- 
 bellishment of their public institutions with the finest 
 works of art they can obtain. By your exhibitions, 
 your art classes and lectures, your cheap books, and 
 your popular illustrated periodicals you take care to 
 cultivate and elevate the taste for art among the 
 people ; let them once catch the enthusiasm of the 
 thing, and the public demand on every branch of art 
 will soon counterbalance a hundred times over any 
 curtailment of the purchase of high-class manufactures 
 and art productions by a comparatively small pluto- 
 cracy provided only that the people, whose taste you 
 have been cultivating and elevating, can be rendered 
 fairly prosperous. Cultivate the taste of the people, 
 and give them ideas, and give them a fair day's work
 
 74 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 and a fair day's pay, and then music, and pictures, and 
 fine buildings, and statues, and noble parks, and 
 gardens, and any other expense demanded for the 
 enrichment of social life will be freely voted and 
 worthily enjoyed. But you cultivate the taste of the 
 people, and quicken their intelligence, and enlarge 
 their ideals of life, and then leave them to fierce and 
 ^r brutal competition, and by your education of them 
 you will but have added a refinement to the cruelty 
 of their lot, and a terrible element of peril to the 
 very existence of society. 
 
 No doubt there will be many superior persons who 
 will be vastly amused at the mere idea of the working- 
 classes becoming patrons of the arts and the possessors 
 of pianos in their homes. The bare possibility that a 
 working-man's home may become tasteful and pleasant, 
 and the centre of anything approaching intellectual 
 and cultivated interest must, I know, be utterlj- in- 
 credible to many good souls. There are a great many 
 who take it for granted that between the working- 
 man and their own highly respectable and virtuous 
 selves there is some sort of difference of nature. They 
 speak and think of the " working-class " as of a 
 diffeient order of beings, who, in all matters of taste 
 and intelligence, are and must ever remain on a lower 
 plane of existence. It is not of much use to argue 
 with people dominated by prejudices and antipathies 
 of this kind. Happily, such prejudices are rapidly 
 dying out. By degrees we are all coming to perceive 
 that the difference between class and class is pretty 
 much a difference of circumstances, of opportunities, 
 and general environment. Give the working-classes
 
 THE CLASSES AND THE MASSES. 75 
 
 as we are now giving every year more and more 
 abundantly the same means of education and culture, 
 as are enjoyed by the great middle-class of the 
 country, and secure for them a similar degree of 
 freedom and leisure, and in due time, we may depend 
 upon it, they will occupy, in all matters of taste and 
 intelligence, pretty much the footing that that great 
 middle-class does now. 
 
 Just consider for a moment that the working and 
 labouring people of this country are the overwhelming 
 majority of the whole population. Suppose that by 
 any such changes as we have been considering you 
 could, in the course of the next generation or two, 
 lift the whole of that vast mass of population to the 
 present moral and intellectual standpoint of the 
 English lower middle-class. It is very largely a 
 matter of material comfort, and prosperity, and leisure 
 to avail themselves of the moral and intellectual ad- 
 vantages that the times have provided for them. 
 Suppose that you could thus advance the whole of 
 the working-class to about the level of the class just 
 above them, is it not probable that for all the interests 
 of art, and literature, and manufactures, and com- 
 merce, you would do more than you could hope to do 
 by doubling or trebling the aristocracy of the country, 
 and that you would do it in an infinitely healthier 
 and a more permanent manner ? To a very large 
 extent this has actually been done during the past 
 fifty years. All the best statistical authorities are 
 agreed that the comfortable and prosperous middle- 
 class is larger now than it ever was, and that its 
 character is of a higher type. There is not a doubt
 
 76 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 that vast numbers of the lowest class have been 
 absorbed into this more comfortable and prosperous 
 stratum above, and it may be thought that we have 
 only to go on in that same direction, and in due time 
 all will be well. I do not think so, and presently I 
 may tell you why I doubt it. But that some absorp- 
 tion into the lower middle-class from the stratum 
 below has been going on is undeniable, and what has 
 been the result ? You have a permanent demand 
 upon every department of social activity quite un- 
 precedented in the history of our civilisation. Whether 
 art of the highest type and in its highest manifesta- 
 tions is, or is not, in a more satisfactory condition 
 now than it has ever been before may be a question. 
 But I imagine no competent authority will dispute 
 for a moment that there is ten times a greater amount 
 of excellent art workmanship in almost every form 
 now in demand for the supply of the lowlier homes 
 of England than there ever was before. On the 
 whole, it may safely be said that art, and science, and 
 literature, trade and manufactures, are far more 
 flourishing now than they ever have been, and that 
 their prosperity is mainly based on the comfortable 
 prosperity of the great middle-class of the community. 
 If this be granted and I do not see how it can be 
 disputed then it seems to follow, as a matter of 
 course, that if you wish to promote the general wel- 
 fare, and to stimulate the production of all that is 
 luxurious in life, the most effectual way to do it in 
 the long run is to make that prosperous, comfortable 
 middle-class as large as you can by absorbing into it 
 as rapidly as you are able all the best of the sad and 
 suffering section beneath it.
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 BUT THE SMALL INVESTOR THE WIDOWS AND 
 WEAKLINGS ? 
 
 To get back, then, to the question with which we 
 started Is there no solid, all-sufficient advantage in 
 having a class in society drawing and spending large 
 incomes entirely without work ? I say that there is \. 
 not. The wringing out of these large incomes from the 
 labouring masses involves, and always must involve, 
 the literal sacrifice of all the highest interests of those 
 masses, and brings no public benefit which cannot be 
 secured in a thousandfold greater measure by a 
 different system. 
 
 But here I can imagine a critical reader putting in 
 an objection. I grant you, he says, that in the social 
 system which permits immense fortunes to be made 
 by investment of money without any sort of personal 
 effort, there is much that is unsatisfactory in many 
 ways. People invest their money and pocket their 
 dividends, and rarely trouble their heads much about 
 the manner in which their dividends are earned. 
 There is undoubtedly much that needs amendment. 
 But then, you know, it is not all investors who make 
 large incomes. What about the small investor say 
 the widow lady, the aged, the invalid, or the struggling 
 professional men with a small sum of hardly-earned 
 
 77
 
 78 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 money invested to eke out a living ? Would you 
 put it out of their power to find such investments ? 
 
 As regards these widows and invalids and struggling 
 professional men and weaklings in general, recollect 
 that those among them who have anything at all to 
 invest are among the most fortunate of a very large 
 class. They are only a small minority of that class. 
 It is quite right to bear in mind the widows whose 
 slender incomes are derived from shares ; but it is 
 only fair to remember also the vastly larger number 
 of widows who have no incomes at all but such as 
 they are able to obtain by the work they can clutch 
 in the wild competitive hurly-burly around them. I 
 could, I think, harrow your feelings considerably by 
 a few sample stories of widows and other unfriended 
 women, who, by sheer misfortune, have sunk from 
 comfortable and respectable positions in life, and are 
 at this moment struggling down in the deepest depths 
 without investment, without employment, wasting 
 away, sickening in despair, but hoping and struggling 
 on for the poorest shelter and the hardest crust out- 
 side the workhouse ay, and not a few of them have 
 been plunged into that misery by the mistakes made 
 by themselves or their friends in investing their small 
 fortunes in foolish or fraudulent business enterprises. 
 
 Oh ! the pitiable tragedies that come of those small 
 investments in mines and inventions and bubble com- 
 panies and promising follies and swindles of all 
 kinds ! In the long run, and taking them all round, 
 these feeble folk, with their little savings, would be 
 vastly better off without the power to become share- 
 holders in grand schemes for wresting out profits
 
 THE SMALL INVESTOR. 79 
 
 from the blood and sweat of their fellow-creatures; 
 and as for the still feebler folk the widows and un- 
 married women, and people generally, who, by phy- 
 sical and mental constitution, are unequal to a struggle 
 with the strongest around them and have no capital 
 at all, God help them ! What chance have they in 
 this mad scramble for employment ? Lay your 
 strong hand upon the stragglers, restrain their violent 
 eagerness, reduce them to order and system, and in 
 the multifarious requirements of your everyday social 
 life you may find nooks and corners which the weakest 
 of these weaklings may be competent to fill usefully 
 and honourably and happily. But while they are all 
 hustling and battling together, it is the strong and 
 the competent only who can elbow their way to the 
 front the strong and the competent and the self- 
 asserting, those who are well able to take care of 
 themselves, and are not, perhaps, greatly hindered by 
 any scruples as to their mode of doing it ; while the 
 gentle and diffident, the timorous and weak and 
 scrupulous all whose peculiarities do not quite run 
 in the ways of the world, very admirable and worthy 
 though their peculiarities may sometimes be all 
 these go down in the struggle by the thousand, and 
 though perhaps they may not often die of actual 
 starvation, they just ebb away. You can see the 
 people dying of mere inanition and broken hearts. 
 And this competitive struggle is the system with 
 which many good Christian people are so supremely 
 satisfied, that if any man, however honest and dis- 
 interested he may be, comes forward to declare his 
 belief that it is a bad system and ought to be speedily
 
 8o THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 superseded by order and control and organisation, 
 they will at once dub him a dangerous and dis- 
 orderly person who wants to make an income by 
 preaching revolutionary doctrines, and to possess 
 himself of other people's property by overturning 
 society! " It is truly wonderful," says an able anony- 
 mous writer, whose words I have just been reading in 
 a current periodical "it is truly wonderful to a 
 philosophic mind what unanimity of speech and action 
 can be evoked from mankind in favour of what is. 
 No matter how irrational, how inconvenient, how 
 injurious, how flagrantly monstrous even a thing may 
 be, if it is actually existent, and can boast of anti- 
 quity, however limited, the whole world will rush to 
 its defence." 
 
 What a perplexing phenomenon it is, I have often 
 thought, that Christian preachers and teachers and 
 their churches should, seemingly by instinct, range 
 themselves among the upholders of the system of 
 unrestricted competition should be the defenders 
 and justifiers of this selfish scramble; while the men 
 whom they dub atheists and infidels and rowdies and 
 demagogues, and I know not what besides, are lifting 
 up their voices all over Europe in vehement demand 
 for orderly and harmonious working in peace and 
 brotherhood, for justice to the poor and oppressed, and 
 for brighter, and healthier, and happier home life. 
 Many a time as I have listened to stump orators in 
 the slums of London men, some of them very grimy 
 of hand, and, perhaps, a little coarse in language I 
 have felt the strongest conviction that those men had 
 caught a divine ideal, that they had attained to a
 
 THE SMALL INVESTOR. 81 
 
 splendid conception of a social cosmos, and that 
 whether they knew it or not, they were really preach- 
 ing the gospel of the New Testament. 
 
 A splendid conception it may be, but it is im- 
 practicable, you say. It won't work. Well, if the 
 Christian churches and Christian people generally 
 had really thrashed out the matter, had given their 
 most earnest attention to Socialist proposals, and had 
 sorrowfully found themselves forced to the conviction 
 that they were mistaken, one could understand them. 
 But the real facts are nothing of the kind. Here 
 are whole masses of the population of this country 
 steeped to the lips in misery and degradation, and 
 here is another section of the community rolling in 
 wealth and luxury, and here are earnest men, many of 
 them extremely able men, going out into the high- 
 ways and byways with fierce denunciations against 
 the continuance of such a state of things and with 
 proposals for its remedy. One would think that all 
 the sympathies of Christian people would at once 
 range themselves on the side of these men ay, even 
 though they were as grimy of hand and as unpolished 
 of speech as the Apostles of Jesus of Nazareth. One 
 would think that, at least, their sympathies would be 
 with them, even though there might be grave room 
 for doubting their grasp of a difficult subject and the 
 efficacy of their proposed remedies. One would think 
 that everywhere their proposals would be eagerly 
 listened to and earnestly considered, and that men 
 and women, undoubtedly deeply sympathetic with the 
 poor in their sufferings, would not rest until they had 
 got to the bottom of them, and could see just what
 
 82 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 was in them. The great majority of even the best 
 and ablest of people apparently never dream of doing 
 this. They won't believe in the practicability of doing 
 away with even the utmost extremes of poverty, and 
 they shrink from any proposals for interfering with 
 the extremest accumulations of wealth. They have 
 indeed a certain undefined conviction that the starv- 
 ing and suffering poor have their moral uses in 
 the world, and that their perpetual existence in our 
 midst was recognised as proper and necessary by 
 Christ Himself. " The poor ye have always with 
 you," said Christ, and this they have twisted into a 
 prophecy. Of course it was nothing of the kind. It 
 was a mere statement of a simple matter of fact at 
 that time and at that place. " Why this waste ? " said 
 the carping critics. " This might have been given to the 
 poor." " Never mind," was the reply. " If you are 
 so very anxious about the poor, there are plenty of 
 opportunities for you. You have always the poor 
 with you. You will not have me long." To convert 
 this into a prophetic warrant for nineteenth century 
 Christians, calmly tolerating in their midst social con- 
 ditions of life which degrade hundreds of thousands 
 of men, women, and children into mere savages, and 
 inflict upon them indescribable wretchedness, seems 
 to me neither more nor less than a blasphemous de- 
 famation of Christ's character. Yet not only do good 
 people argue this way, but they dare to believe that 
 the horrible state of things they find in the slums of 
 all the great towns of the kingdom is permitted in 
 order that some flabby sort of virtue called Christian 
 sympathy may be evinced and maintained in mild
 
 THE SMALL INVESTOR. 83 
 
 activity in the middle and upper classes. Bless their 
 good souls ! they are shocked when they hear of the 
 ancient Greeks making their helots drunk in order to 
 promote the virtue of sobriety in their children ; but 
 what is that compared with the policy of keeping vast 
 communities of men, women, and children in poverty, 
 degradation, and misery, in order to engender pity 
 and compassion in the souls of the upper ten or the 
 middle-class ten thousand ? What a wretched notion 
 is this that it can be any part of the policy of a 
 Divine Fatherhood permanently to keep the lower 
 masses of society in helpless indigence and degrada- 
 tion in order to bring about the play of compassion 
 on one side and gratitude on the other. As though so 
 long as h're burns and water drowns, and friends are 
 parted by distance and by death, while accidents 
 happen and diseases afflict, and men are weak and 
 foolish and erring, there is not likely to be enough 
 sorrow and suffering in a world like this without a 
 little London " slumming " to keep the charitable 
 emotions in healthy play ! What would be thought of 
 an English statesman who should deliberately propose 
 that half a million of people at one end of London 
 should be permanently doomed to the utmost ex- 
 tremes of poverty, and all the sorrows and sufferings 
 involved in it, in order that a few thousands at the 
 other end of London should have their sympathies 
 gently tickled into spasmodic activity occasionally ? 
 Why, he would be laughed off the stage with the most 
 contemptuous ignominy. And yet, that is precisely 
 the arrangement which good, kindly, God-fearing 
 people are content to regard as an ordinance of Divine
 
 84 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 Providence ! Why, it often seems to me extremely 
 questionable whether, on the whole, this terrible mass 
 of poverty and suffering does not blunt and destroy 
 more kindly sympathy than it creates by our mei*e 
 familiarity with it. Of this, at least, I do not enter- 
 tain a shadow of doubt, that any good it may effect, 
 by quickening sympathy on one side and calling 
 forth gratitude on the other, is counterbalanced a 
 thousand times by the debasing, demoralising influence 
 of extreme poverty on the poor themselves. The 
 rubbish that one sometimes hears about the blessings 
 of poverty is mere cant in which nobody honestly 
 believes. In a position of comparative poverty a 
 position poor and lowly and private as distinguished 
 from the lot of those who are highly placed, and are 
 heavily charged with great wealth and great power, 
 and the responsibilities and temptations which come 
 of such endowments no doubt there are great advan- 
 tages. The poor, in that comparative sense, if they 
 only knew what is really good for them, would no 
 doubt often feel profoundly thankful for the peace 
 and pleasantness of their daily path. But for anyone 
 to pretend to believe that there is any good whatever 
 in a state of poverty which compels men and women 
 to herd together like beasts, makes of bright-eyed 
 little children cripples and idiots and permanent in- 
 valids from sheer want of good food and wholesome 
 circumstances, and for everybody exposed to it renders 
 life a dull, weary, sordid struggle for mere existence, 
 without decency, without independence, without free- 
 dom, without everything that makes life worth living 
 to pretend to believe that in such poverty there is
 
 THE SMALL INVESTOR. 85 
 
 any good whatever, except such good as may come 
 from plague, pestilence, and famine, battle, murder, 
 and sudden death, is mere cant and hypocrisy. No- 
 body does believe in the good of it. Nobody can 
 believe in the good of it. Every living man accus- 
 tomed to a different fortune would for himself shrink 
 in horror and dismay from such a fate if it appeared 
 to be impending over him. We have no right to per- 
 suade ourselves that this sort of poverty is a God- 
 ordained institution for evolving virtue. It is our 
 bounden duty to recognise in it a deadly, desolating 
 influence, ruining men's bodies and souls; it is our 
 bounden duty, earnestly and heartily, to do all that 
 may be done, not only to counteract this influence, but 
 to destroy it. 
 
 You can do nothing till you can get the people to 
 work. On a foundation of good, honest labour you 
 may build anything you please. All your labour for 
 the material, moral, and intellectual welfare of the 
 masses will tell, and just in proportion as you labour 
 wisely and well will the advance of your people be 
 rapid. On a foundation of work you can build any- 
 thing you please. On a foundation of doles and 
 charities and free meals you can build nothing that 
 is worthy of your labour. Make that your foundation, 
 and your whole structure, tier after tier, must be 
 charity, charity, charity, all the way up. Even then 
 you cannot escape Socialism. There is no more 
 socialistic institution imaginable than a modern 
 workhouse. But it is Socialism based on infirmity, 
 incapacity, or vice. It is rotten and diseased and bad. 
 Set the unemployed to work not in any casual odd-
 
 86 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 jobbing, hand-to-mouth fashion, but in a broad, 
 systematic, comprehensive scheme, constructed on an 
 intelligible principle of order and organisation ; set 
 the people to work regular, useful, fairly- paid 
 work and you will put them on a footing of manly 
 and womanly independence that will enable them to 
 do for themselves many things which you perhaps are 
 labouring to do for them with great difficulty and 
 sore discouragement. They will do much for them- 
 selves, and you may be able to work for them and 
 with them in all sorts of ways, for their mental and 
 moral improvement. You may then feel your sym- 
 pathy drawn out to them without any mingling of 
 contempt, and they may return you gratitude un- 
 alloyed by a sense of degradation. Devise some 
 system of getting the people to work while they can 
 work, and when they have fairly done their duty by 
 society, let society give them honourable maintenance. 
 In Heaven's name give, in your social scheme, no place 
 for " small investments " in private commercial enter- 
 prise.
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 WHAT ABOUT THE DIFFICULTY OF JOBBERY AND 
 CORRUPTION ? 
 
 YES, you say, the fundamental importance of work 
 for the unemployed must be quite clear to every 
 reasonable person, and it is equally clear that to some 
 extent, at any rate, it would be possible to do this by 
 public control of some departments of our activity, in 
 which unrestricted competition does undoubtedly 
 work great mischief. But you know a very common 
 objection to such action is that by handing this, that, 
 and other thing to State control, you will be opening 
 up unlimited opportunities for jobbery and cor- 
 ruption. 
 
 In thinking over this point in the subject, it would 
 be very desirable to get rid of that idea of "the State." 
 All Europe has laughed over the pompous utterance 
 of King Louis of France, when he exclaimed, " L'etat, 
 c'est moi." It was very ludicrous, no doubt ; but to a 
 very great extent it was also very true. The time 
 was, and not so very long ago, when the King really 
 was the State, both in France and England, just as 
 the monarch is now in Russia and Turkey. But the 
 rapid advance of democratic power has totally changed 
 all that, and is changing it from day to day. Only 
 last year Mr. Goschen urged this fact upon the atten- 
 
 87
 
 88 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 tion of civil servants. The civil service, he observed, 
 is at present in the position of an establishment that 
 lias changed its masters. The old public had been 
 superseded by a new public. The new master, he 
 pointed out, was in many ways more particular, and 
 he entreated civil servants to adapt themselves to the 
 ways of the new master. They should not think the 
 new master fussy, and they must not be too touchy 
 and sensitive. They should not treat the desire for 
 reform which was abroad as a hostile attack on their 
 privileges, to be resented with extreme sensitiveness. 
 In all this Mr. Goschen clearly recognises a change of 
 a most momentous and all-important character in 
 relation to this matter. When the King and his 
 ministers were " the State," then, no doubt, it was to 
 the interest of the community that "the State'' should 
 have as little as possible to do with trade and manu- 
 facture, and all the multifarious activities of social 
 life. Jobbery and corruption would inevitably pre- 
 vail. But the monarch is no longer the State. We 
 you and I are the State. We have the public 
 service under our control, as we never had before, 
 and that control is being asserted more and more 
 every year we live. I am far from saying that in 
 these services there is no jobbery or corruption. But 
 I do maintain with the utmost confidence, that in the 
 purity of our public service, and the elevation of our 
 standard of public morality, we have made the most 
 gratifying advances within a comparatively recent 
 period. If one wanted to give illustrations of this, 
 the difficulty would be not to find the illustrations, 
 but to determine which to pick out fiom a bewilder-
 
 JOBBERY AND CORRUPTION. 89 
 
 ing multiplicity of facts presenting themselves when 
 one comes to look back a little. Take any depart- 
 ment of the public service you please, and compare 
 our present standard with that of the time of our 
 grandfathers, and you will probably be startled at the 
 change that has taken place. Take, for instance, the 
 administration of justice. Here in London we some- 
 times hear complaints that the magistrates are not 
 entirely evenhanded and impartial. But just com- 
 pare them with their predecessors who were not 
 stipendiaries, but, like the present country magistrates, 
 were supposed to be gentlemen who undertook the 
 administration of justice merely for the honour of the 
 thing, and for the sake of serving the public, though 
 there were certain fees that their office entitled them 
 to. Sir John Fielding says that one of his prede- 
 cessors boasted of having been astute enough to make 
 a thousand a year out of his berth, and it was well- 
 known that the "honorary" post of magistrate was 
 often very lucrative. How it was managed, we are 
 partly informed by the famous John Townsencl, a 
 Bow Street officer, whose shrewd, clear-headed testi- 
 mony made a profound impression on a parliamentary 
 committee in 1816. He declared emphatically that, 
 " before the Police Bill," previous to the year 1792, 
 that is, justice was all a trading business, and one 
 way in which the magistrates made it pay was " to 
 issue out warrants and take up all the poor devils in 
 the streets, and then there was the bailing them, 
 2s. 4(3., which the magistrate had, and taking up a 
 hundred girls, that would make, at 2s. 4cl, 11 13s. 4d. 
 They sent none to gaol, for the bailing them was so
 
 90 THE SOCIAL HORIZON, 
 
 much better." That evidence of Townsend's was in- 
 disputably true. Some years before the time of which 
 this witness here speaks, it was discovered that for 
 twenty years a gang of ruffians had made good livings 
 by trumping up charges against innocent persons, and 
 pocketing the considerable pecuniary reward the law 
 at that time allowed informers ; and there seems to 
 have been no doubt, that at least some of the London 
 magistrates were well aware of what was going on, 
 and winked at the conviction and execution of 
 innocent persons on the testimony of these wretches, 
 for the sake of the steady inflow of fees they were 
 instrumental in keeping up. So flagrant and bare- 
 faced did the corruption of London magistrates be- 
 come at one time, that they were commonly known 
 as " basket justices " those whose "justice " depended 
 on the contents of the baskets with which suitors 
 came to court and Fielding says that they were 
 never indifferent in a cause but when they could get 
 nothing on either side. 
 
 Now what was the cause of this ? The simple 
 truth was that the mass of the people had no sort of 
 influence on such matters. Depend upon it they 
 were profoundly conscious of the tragic iniquity of 
 this sort of thing, but they could do nothing to remedy 
 it. Of course the Government of the day were well 
 aware of what went on, but they, and the upper 
 classes generally, could get "justice " that suited their 
 purposes very well whenever they chose to ask for it, 
 and that was all they wanted obsequious magistrates, 
 who would do the bidding of those in authority, or 
 those who could pay them. As to the mass of the
 
 JOBBERY AND CORRUPTION. 91 
 
 common people, what they thought of it, or what 
 they wished, was a matter of no great importance to 
 anybody. They had no votes to be used against the 
 Government, and they had no press to influence the 
 opinions of those who had votes. All they could do 
 was now and then to break out in riot, and then they 
 would get shot down in the streets or hanged in rows. 
 How utterly hopeless it must have appeared to the 
 people of these times that jobbery and corruption 
 would ever be so far swept away that the poorest 
 among them could rely on even-handed justice as 
 certainly as the greatest and richest man in London. 
 Perhaps we have not quite attained that even yet. 
 But just imagine, if you can, a suitor for justice going 
 to Mr. Vaughan, or Mr. Bridge, or Mr. Montagu 
 Williams with a present of a couple of ducks, or a 
 sucking pig, or a haunch of venison, to be laid in the 
 magistrate's private room before the case came on ! 
 What a refreshing stir there would be in the social 
 atmosphere if My Lord Tom Noddy, having a charge 
 brought against him by a London cabman, should 
 venture to send, on the morning of the trial, a couple of 
 valuable young sporting dogs for which, he had reason 
 to believe, his worship had a special fancy. Why, 
 the very idea of the thing strikes one as ludicrous. 
 London magistrates, even the best of them, are but 
 men, and their justice no doubt is imperfect ; but the 
 man who should attempt to obtain a verdict from 
 any one of them by any form of bribery would prove 
 himself little short of an idiot. 
 
 Now just put in mental juxtaposition the magis- 
 terial bench of Fielding's day and the London rnagis-
 
 92 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 terial bench of our own day, and you have some 
 measure of the advance we have made with our stan- 
 dard of public morality, and in the power of the 
 democracy. 
 
 You will find the same progress in whichever way 
 you look. Take our electioneering. We have not, I 
 fear, entirely done with bribery and corruption ; but 
 just compare our present standard of what is right 
 and honourable now with the standard everywhere 
 recognised within the memory of many now living. 
 It is really astounding to observe what the best of 
 men were capable of in the old days before the advent 
 of democracy. Few men have ever stood higher in 
 the purity and integrity of their character than the 
 almost saintly Wilberforce. But here is an interesting 
 passage from the life of this good man, who died less 
 than sixty years ago : " His election for Hull cost him 
 eight or nine thousand pounds. After a successful 
 canvass on the spot, he repaired to London, where 
 about 300 Hull freemen resided in the vicinity of the 
 river ; these he entertained at supper in the different 
 public-houses of Wapping. ... By long estab- 
 lished custom the single vote of a resident elector was 
 rewarded with a donation of two guineas ; four were 
 paid for a plumper ; and the expenses of a freeman's 
 journey from London averaged 10 apiece. The 
 letter of the law was not broken because the money 
 was not paid until the last day on which election 
 petitions could be presented." 
 
 I am not, of course, quoting this as a flagrant 
 instance of bribery and corruption. The records of 
 the period teem with stories incomparably more
 
 JOBBERY AND CORRUPTION. 93 
 
 scandalous than this. But the interest of this bio- 
 graphical passage consists in the light it sheds on the 
 public morality of that day. Here is one of the best 
 and the most conscientious men who ever lived feasting 
 his freemen at public-houses and freely bribing them 
 in defiance of the law, which he evades by the simple 
 device of postponing actual payment till after a 
 certain day. What a thorough revolution has been 
 effected in public thought and feeling since the time 
 when even a good man could act in this way without 
 shame or compunction ! And pretty much the same 
 change has been effected in every department of 
 public life and activity, and the change is going on 
 probably faster than ever. We have had, and we 
 shall have, a good deal to contend with in the un- 
 scrupulous rascality of unfaithful public servants. 
 But with this evil we must grapple just as we have 
 grappled with the roguery of the bench and the cor- 
 ruption of the hustings and the polling booth. B}' 
 legislative enactment, and by the creation of a healthy 
 and enlightened public sentiment, we must make the 
 breach of official trust and the neglect of official duty 
 as disgraceful as card-sharping or forgery, and un- 
 doubtedly we have made in this direction such pro- 
 gress in the past as to afford reasonable ground for 
 the brightest hopes for the future. All the in- 
 fluences and tendencies of the times are dead against 
 evils of this nature. The popular interest in public 
 affairs, the glare of publicity that has begun to flood 
 all the dark corners of official life, the power of the 
 press, and the practical turn that religion has taken 
 during the present generation, are all combining to
 
 94 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 render obsolete the objection undoubtedly at one 
 time seemingly insuperable that by extending public 
 control of industry you will multiply official posts 
 and open the way for jobbery and corruption. We 
 have now an altogether higher standard of public 
 morality than we had at the beginning of the present 
 century. The statesman who should attempt to 
 carry on Government by Walpole's system of whole- 
 sale bribery is an utter impossibility in our day. 
 The public politician who should seriously propose 
 to go back to the corrupt old system of nomination 
 for the civil service, or the purchase of army commis- 
 sions, would be laughed at as an old fossil. Many 
 men would express the opinion that there was much 
 to be said for the old order of things, but no man who 
 understands the temper of the times would dream of 
 proposing to revert to that old order. A man cannot 
 now more readily commend himself to public favour 
 than by ferreting out some sinecure or job for 
 general denunciation. So strong is the public feeling 
 against all forms and phases of unfaithfulness and 
 mal-administration in public affairs that we seem at 
 times in no little danger of doing the greatest in- 
 justice. For thirty years and more we had a Metro- 
 politan Board of Works, which, on the whole, did 
 London splendid service. Two or three of its officers 
 are convicted of corrupt practices, and the whole 
 fabric goes down like a house of cards, and is swept 
 away with contemptuous impatience. 
 
 A phenomenon of that kind and it is only one of 
 a great many that could be mentioned is not to be 
 regarded as indisputable evidence of universal honesty.
 
 JOBBERY AND CORRUPTION. 95 
 
 Certainly not. The most corruptible of men are 
 often seen to be the readiest and the loudest to howl 
 down corruption in others. That is by no means 
 peculiar to our own day. But there is another fact 
 which is quite a special feature of our own times, and 
 that is the eminently practical turn which religion 
 has taken. The revelations of geological and bio- 
 logical science, and the results of fearless Biblical 
 criticism, have resulted in an almost complete collapse 
 of dogmatic theology, and in a marvellous develop- 
 ment of the sense of practical duty. Progress and 
 reform have come to be the watchwords of Christians 
 and Agnostics alike, and general intelligence and wider 
 views of life have been making it clearer and clearer 
 from year to year that there can be no effectual social 
 reform, no really satisfactory progress, until every 
 man shall learn, honestly and honourably, to do his 
 duty. Men have grown sick of theological contro- 
 versy, and have joined hands on the common ground 
 of duty and practical effort for the benefit of humanity. 
 Very generally men have come to say with Pope : 
 
 " For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight, 
 His can't be wrong whose life is in the right," 
 
 a faith, by the way, which many men may and do 
 hold, even when their own lives are wholly in the 
 wrong. 
 
 All the mental and moral and social influences of the 
 age have conspired to create an insatiable demand for 
 a higher standard of public morality, just as power- 
 fully as all the mechanical, scientific, and commercial 
 influences of the times have combined to force men
 
 96 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 into great organisations ; and, looking over the whole 
 arena from the providential point of view, I confess 
 that, to my mind, the coincidence of this moral and 
 this material development side by side presents the 
 most startling and significant fact in contemporary 
 human history. 
 
 The objection, that by too freely resorting to public 
 and official control and management, you run a great 
 risk of opening wa} 7 s for jobbery and corruption, is 
 one of which I fully recognise the weight and im- 
 portance. It is plain and palpable to every candid 
 mind, that without a certain standard of public- 
 spirited rectitude, the socialistic idea could not be 
 carried out with any useful result; it would indeed 
 very probably result in more evil than it cured. For 
 that reason, if for no other, Socialism has been im- 
 practicable in the past. But I hold strongly that on 
 that ground it is impracticable no longer. Our 
 standard of public morality has been immensely 
 raised, our means of scrutiny and control have been 
 enormously developed, and our public methods and 
 system of procedure have been entirely changed of 
 late years. Jobbery and corruption which would 
 have been inevitable and quite ruinous last century 
 are quite impossible in these days of publicity and 
 democratic interest. No doubt it is necessary even 
 now to proceed with great caution and circumspection. 
 If one could conceive the possibility of the nation 
 taking a socialistic craze and running absolutely wild, 
 regardless of all the dictates of ordinary prudence 
 and common sense if one could conceive of our doing 
 as some Socialists would seem to be advocating, and at
 
 JOBBERY AND CORRUPTION. 97 
 
 one fell swoop. taking over all the railways, and all 
 the mines, and all the shipping, and all the manu- 
 factures in the kingdom then, no doubt, jobbery and 
 corruption would be rampant enough, and probably 
 at no very distant date we should find ourselves over 
 head and ears in troubles far greater than any we had 
 hoped to escape from. 
 
 We must go warily and gradually. It must be a 
 growth and not a revolution, and all that I am con- 
 tending for is, that instead of regarding the public 
 control of the industries of the people as something to 
 be dreaded and avoided and obstructed, we should 
 really look upon it as a goal to which we should push 
 on with all possible speed consistent with safety and 
 prudence. As I began by pointing out, it is not as 
 though the principle I am advocating were entirely 
 new and untried. In many directions we have been 
 forced to adopt it, and I venture to think with the 
 happiest results where the principle has been applied 
 under what I may call modern conditions. I make 
 this reservation because we have some Government 
 establishments, which may be pointed out as essen- 
 tially socialistic as to their basis and functions, though 
 it is to be feared that in many ways they are any- 
 thing but satisfactory. I refer to our Admiralty and 
 War Office, our naval dockyards and arsenals, which 
 have at least the reputation of being centres of gross 
 extravagance, and a great deal of mismanagement, if 
 not of actual corruption. It will generally be found 
 that when people express their objection to any kind 
 of socialistic proposal, by allusions to the lavish ex- 
 penditure and the loose management of public depart-
 
 98 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 ments, they have in mind something that has come to 
 their knowledge in connection with the army and 
 navy supply and equipment. 
 
 These departments are of course socialistic, inas- 
 much as they are public institutions, maintained at 
 the public cost, and are under public control. But it 
 must be remembered that they are not modern 
 creations at all, and they are under public control 
 only in a very indirect and roundabout sense. They 
 are old, and to a great extent still, they are unre- 
 formed establishments. Their roots are deep down in 
 the past, and abuses have grown up with them, and 
 have become part and parcel of them. They have 
 never hitherto been much under the influence of 
 democracy, and even if they ever become so, they 
 must always be extremely difficult of management. 
 They are subject to exceptional influences, which 
 eveiy now and again completely override everything. 
 However efficiently and economically Portsmouth 
 dockyard may be managed to-day, to-morrow, let 
 anything approaching a war panic break out, and all 
 considerations of economy of course go to the winds 
 at once. It becomes immediately a point of patriotism 
 to sacrifice everything to speedy preparation, and the 
 whole establishment necessarily becomes more or less 
 demoralised, and will probably remain so long after 
 the panic may have blown over. 
 
 Our fighting establishments are, no doubt, Govern- 
 ment institutions, and, for aught I know, they may be 
 badly and extravagantly managed. I am not for a 
 moment concerned to repel any such charges against 
 them. They are mere relics of barbarism fungus
 
 JOBBERY AND CORRUPTION. 99 
 
 growths of the night, sucking out the life-sap of the 
 social tree ; but they are destined to wither away 
 and disappear as the rising sun of intelligence and 
 righteousness smites upon them. They have played 
 their part in the more brutal stage of human evolu- 
 tion, and they have done good service in fostering 
 and developing organising talents, high ideals of duty 
 and devotion, and subjection to discipline. Apparently 
 they have not yet served their full purpose. But the 
 time will come when they have done so, and they 
 and all their scientific devilry will vanish, and the 
 traditions of it all shall be but a bad dream. Mean- 
 while, though they are a creation of Socialism, it is 
 the Socialism of ruin and destruction, and anything 
 to be inferred from it can have no safe application 
 to the principle of joint harmonious working in the 
 paths of peace and productive industry. 
 
 The simple truth is that apart from the barbar- 
 ism of war our social circumstances are altogether 
 new. We can safely and easily undertake now what 
 would have been absolutely impossible a century ago, 
 and it is mere folly to persist in repeating objections 
 that are no longer valid.
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 PUBLIC WORK WELL DONE. 
 
 IT is not to the Admiralty or the War Office or the 
 dockyards and arsenals we should look if we want to 
 judge fairly of what a public establishment may be, 
 and how public work may be done. There arc two 
 institutions that always occur to my mind when I 
 look round for an illustration of what may be done 
 by public enterprise. One of them is the Post-Office 
 and the other the Government clothing factory at 
 Pimlico, which, notwithstanding that it is connected 
 with the army, and therefore, of course, quite within 
 the influence of war panics, very admirably illustrates 
 in many ways the advantages of the public control of 
 industry. 
 
 If you propose that Government shall do this, 
 that, and the other thing, you are continually 
 being met with the objection that Government work 
 is always badly done, and is always very costly. But 
 the one great civilian experiment of the kind, of 
 course, is the Post-Office, and this is admitted by 
 everybody to have proved so triumphantly successful 
 and satisfactory that again, and again, and again, we 
 have during the past few years enlarged its functions. 
 To letter-carrying we have added the telegraphs, and 
 to the telegraphs parcel-carrying, and to these we have 
 
 100
 
 PUBLIC WORK WELL DONE. 101 
 
 added the business of a savings bank, of insurance 
 and annuities, and the issue of licenses. By uni- 
 versal agreement, the work, upon the whole, is 
 splendidly managed, and though, no doubt, it would 
 be very foolish for an outsider to say that there is 
 absolutely nothing in connection with it of the nature 
 of jobbery and corruption, it would be at least equally 
 foolish to say that jobbery and corruption are in any 
 appreciable degree characteristic of the department 
 and its work. Broadly speaking, the work is 
 splendidly and honestly and economically done, and 
 everybody admits it, while, curiously enough, with 
 this brilliant socialistic success brought home literally 
 to their very doors every morning, almost everybody 
 seems still to cling to the obsolete idea that public 
 work is bound to be badly and extravagantly per- 
 formed. If you could conceive of the same thing 
 having been attempted a hundred years ago, it un- 
 doubtedly would have been done badly and extrava- 
 gantly. Imagine if you can that a hundred years ago 
 some preternatural ly far-sighted social leader had 
 thought out all the details of our Post-Office organisa- 
 tion, and had predicted that by the close of the nine- 
 teenth century every parish of the United Kingdom 
 would have been brought within the scope of it. 
 Suppose he had foretold that the Government of the 
 day would have had a permanent staff of about 
 64,000 people, besides another 55,000 employed by 
 local postmasters; that in every important village, 
 ever so remote, there would have been a Post-Office 
 official, receiving and distributing letters, post-cards, 
 books, circulars, and newspapers, receiving and paying
 
 102 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 cash, and keeping strict account. Imagine that he 
 had foretold that on every country road from Land's 
 End to John o' Groat's messengers would have been 
 jogging along with valuable parcels and orders for 
 money and bags full of letters, many of them contain- 
 ing cheques and banknotes that altogether the 
 packages thus conveyed would have numbered 
 throughout the kingdom over two thousand live 
 hundred millions in the year ; that in addition to all 
 this, this one Government department would have 
 insured the people's lives, and banked their money, 
 and granted annuities, and issued licenses, and over 
 and above it all would have managed a vast and com- 
 plicated system of telegraphs, largely of its own crea- 
 tion. Why, how simply ridiculous the thing must 
 have seemed to people who knew that the very seats 
 of justice in the metropolis of the empire had only just 
 been purged of the grossest corruption. 
 
 If so crazy a prophecy had been made, and anybody 
 had thought it worth while to pay serious attention 
 to it, what a host of objections might have been raised. 
 Just think of the capital you would want. How could 
 it possibly be made to pay? How could you keep the 
 accounts of twenty thousand post-offices dotted about 
 all over the kingdom ? Think of the pilfering and 
 peculation you would have to contend with ; only 
 consider the patronage you would be placing in the 
 hands of the higher officials ; look at the opportunities 
 for jobbery and corruption you would be affording, 
 and of the political power such an organisation would 
 give to those who had control of it. And then how 
 would you manage it ? Where would you find your
 
 PUBLIC WORK WELL DONE, 103 
 
 trustworthy and competent officials ? How could the 
 Government, sitting in London, exercise any sort of 
 control in the remote villages of western Ireland or 
 northern Scotland ? No, no, the thing is preposterous. 
 If you could make all men honest and disinterested, 
 conscientious and public-spirited, entirely devoted 
 to duty and the public welfare, it might be possible, but 
 so long as human nature is what it is, depend upon it 
 such a fantastic scheme is utterly impracticable. 
 
 But here it is, all working so smoothly, and, upon 
 the whole, so satisfactorily, and with so little practical 
 difficulty, that when it is proposed that, in addition to 
 all it has in hand already, the Post-Office shall take over 
 the telephones, or set up a system of express messen- 
 gers, or of special delivery of letters, the very last 
 thing anybody thinks it necessary to ask is, " Can the 
 department manage it ? " 
 
 And yet, as I have said, in spite of this practical 
 illustration of what can be done by public organisation, 
 in spite of the fact that we have here one of the most 
 extensive and complicated business systems the world 
 has ever seen most efficiently managed and yielding a 
 profit of three millions a year, people will still go 
 on repeating the dicta of their grandfathers about 
 Government undertakings always being badly and 
 extravagantly performed, and the popularly elected 
 County Council of London cannot propose to acquire 
 a beggarly four or five miles of tramway without 
 raising a storm of indignant protest, and awakening 
 the gravest apprehensions for the future of society. 
 Buy tramways indeed ! Why, the next step will be 
 that they will be wanting to work them, and there
 
 104 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 will be a pretty opening for jobbery, for patronage, 
 for peculation, and all the rest of it. 
 
 The other institution I referred to presents, in one 
 respect at least, an even more striking refutation of 
 this traditional notion that Government work must 
 necessarily be bad and expensive as compared with 
 that of private enterprise. The great Pimlico cloth- 
 ing factory was actually set up because the supply of 
 the British army, by private contractors, was so 
 villainously bad. I have, I think, previously alluded 
 to the fact that up to the time of the Crimean War 
 the practice was for the colonels of regiments to 
 arrange for the clothing of their men. Every colonel 
 received a share of a parliamentary grant proportional 
 to the number of men under his command, and he 
 made his own bargains with contractors. The colonel 
 did the best he could for his country and his men 
 not, of course, forgetting himself and screwed down 
 the contract prices to the lowest possible point. The 
 contractors, naturally, counteracted the screwing they 
 were subjected to by screwing down the prices of the 
 materials from which the clothing was to be made 
 to the very utmost limit attainable, and by sweating 
 down the wages of all concerned in the business to the 
 verge of starvation. It must have been somewhere 
 about this time that Tom Hood sang that immortal 
 song of his : 
 
 " Work, work, work ! 
 
 My labour never flags ; 
 And what are its wages ? a bed of straw, 
 A crust of bread and rutis.
 
 PUBLIC WORK WELL DONE. 
 
 " Oh, but for one short hour, 
 A respite however brief ! 
 No blessed leisure for love or hope, 
 But only time for grief ! " 
 
 The whole system, from end to end, was Individual- 
 ism with a vengeance, and the outcome of it all was 
 that our poor fellows were out there in the Crimea 
 by thousands clad in garments that should have 
 kept them in comfort and decency for twelve 
 months, but which literally fell into rags and tatters 
 after six weeks' wear. Many of my readers will very 
 well remember the outburst of indignation all over 
 the country when it became known that our soldiers 
 were out in the frozen trenches before Sebastopol, 
 many of them with scarcely a rag to cover them, and 
 with boots very largely composed of brown paper. 
 The whole nation was scandalised, and some remedy 
 had to be found. What was the remedy ? Further 
 development of Individualism ? A more entire de- 
 pendence on private enterprise ? No ; it was resolved; 
 after a hurried inquiry, that Government should take 
 the work of clothing the army into its own hands, 
 and to-day if anyone would like to see public and 
 private enterprise sharply contrasted he should go 
 first down into the dreadful little workshop homes 
 in which civilian garments are being made up in the 
 midst of everything that is filth} 7 and wretched and 
 inconvenient, and then into this splendid great factory 
 at Pimlico, where, I suppose, at least 2000 people are 
 working in comfort and with every economical ad- 
 vantage that capital and mechanism can afford them.
 
 io6 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 Their principal workroom is a sort of miniature 
 Crystal Palace, as I have already observed. Every- 
 thing is done by machinery. Work is regular and 
 certain ; a doctor and dispenser are entirely employed 
 in looking after the health of the operatives, who have 
 a savings bank, and a sick fund, and a burial club 
 established among them, and who get their meals 
 provided on a co-operative system made to yield just 
 a little profit, that, I believe, is devoted to the purpose 
 of sending invalided workers to the sea-side or minister- 
 ing to their comfort in some other way. For any 
 reasonable person, who knows the conditions of cloth- 
 ing manufacture in London, to look down from the 
 galleries of the great central hall of this establish- 
 ment, or stroll through its various departments, it is 
 simply impossible to resist the conviction that it 
 would be a great day for London a day conducive 
 to health and happiness, morality and economy 
 when all the clothing manufacture for its teeming 
 millions could be carried on upon the system illus- 
 trated here. 
 
 But the work, the work ; how is the work done, 
 and what does it cost ? Well, everybody knows that 
 ever since this Pimlico factory has been going the 
 clothing of the army has been first-rate. And as to 
 the cost, it is also very well known that from the out- 
 set it was arranged that in order to afford some sort 
 of standard of economy, a small portion of the work 
 should still be given out to contractors, and I believe 
 it has been found quite practicable to keep down the 
 Government factory figures pretty closely to those of 
 private firms. Indeed, it seems really absurd to
 
 PUBLIC WORK WELL DONE. 107 
 
 suppose that, with honest and fairly competent control, 
 such an establishment as this cannot compete with 
 any other under the sun. The notion that Govern- 
 ment work must be badly done and extravagantly 
 costly is beyond all question largely traditional from 
 times when there was little light, little publicity, a 
 very rudimentary sense of public honour and honesty. 
 
 But I have heard it said also that Government has 
 always proved itself a hard taskmaster, and that at 
 least its humbler employes have always been treated 
 more oppressively than those of private employers. 
 Of these very departments that I have been alluding 
 to the Post-Office and the Pimlico factory com- 
 plaints of long hours and low wages are by no means 
 unheard of. 
 
 Now, I have never minutely inquired into the 
 grounds of these complaints, and, I am bound to say, 
 therefore, that I do not know what justification there 
 may be for them. But I suppose everybody will 
 allow that, whatever may be the faults to be found 
 with these departments, when we shall have brought 
 the poorest of our working population up to their 
 level of comfort and respectability we shall have made 
 a mighty stride forward. If no well-disposed and 
 industrious man in our midst were in any respect 
 worse off than a postman, our social condition would 
 be vastly more satisfactory than it is at present, and 
 if all our seamstresses, tailors, and needleworkers were 
 as regularly and as lucratively and as comfortably 
 employed as are the operatives at Pimlico, it would be 
 a matter for great congratulation. And there is this 
 most important consideration, too. Whatever may be
 
 io8 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 the condition of postmen and Government seam- 
 stresses, that condition is a matter absolutely under 
 the control of the public. Let the public clearly per- 
 ceive that our letter-carriers are treated unfairly in 
 the matter of pay or of working hours, and the 
 House of Commons may be compelled to put that 
 matter right in a fortnight. But look on the other 
 side of the case : ever since you and I can remember, 
 the "sweating" atrocities going on in the slums of 
 London have outraged the public conscience, and have 
 angered and saddened all humane hearts. We have 
 had Royal Commissions and inquiries and discussions 
 in the public press, and demonstrations in our streets, 
 and denunciations from our pulpits. Statesmen and 
 poets and novelists, and practical philanthropists and 
 journalists, have all addressed themselves to the 
 remedying or the exposure of the evils of sweating, 
 and all of them have been backed up by the strongest 
 possible sentiment. And what has come of it all ? 
 Well, a few of the more respectable and conscientious 
 employers have taken steps for improving the condi- 
 tion of workpeople within the range of their own 
 influence. But the great mass of the " sweating " in 
 all our great centres of industry has been entirely 
 untouched by all our fuming and agitation. Con- 
 fronted by this great evil, we stand, after five and 
 twenty years of agitation, utterly helpless to deal with 
 it. It may be said, perhaps, that some improvement 
 has been affected in the general condition of many of 
 the victims of the sweating system even apart from 
 the benevolent efforts of particular employers. Pos- 
 sibly there may have been. I think there has. But
 
 PUBLIC WORK WELL DONE. 109 
 
 how has this improvement been effected ? Simply 
 by the passing of Factory Laws and the appointment 
 of Government inspectors. But this is public control. 
 Here you have just the principle of the thing the 
 conscience and humanity and enlightenment of the 
 whole community asserting its right to regulate the 
 conditions of industry, and all we want is to carry out 
 that principle fully and effectively, so as not merely 
 to mitigate the misery and degradation of an unre- 
 stricted scramble down among the masses, but to put 
 an end to the scramble altogether. 
 
 For some pages past I have been arguing as though 
 the extension of public control necessarily implied 
 that the " State " the central Government of the 
 country would assume control of things. But of 
 course this would not be the case. The Imperial 
 Government would have important functions, but it 
 would certainly be found expedient on many grounds 
 to decentralise, as far as possible, and to let local 
 centres of population manage their own industries. 
 It is obviously quite right that the central Govern- 
 ment should be responsible for imperial defence, for 
 the punishment of criminals, for the management of 
 the Post-Office and the telegraphs, because they are 
 not local affiairs ; but it would as obviously be quite 
 wrong for the central Government to assume control 
 of the tramways and omnibuses and cabs of London, 
 or Birmingham, or Manchester. They are entirely 
 local affairs, and should be managed by the local 
 councils, and whatever departments of activity it 
 might be thought expedient to put under public con- 
 trol, as far as possible it should be the local public
 
 no THE SOCIAL HORIZON, 
 
 control. The function of " the State " with respect to 
 such local affairs would be to see to it that one 
 localit} 7 was not in any way prejudicing another, either 
 by any form of competition or by any form of obstruc- 
 tion. It might sometimes be necessary for the State 
 to require local authorities to assume control of in- 
 dustry, and to adopt certain lines of action. For 
 instance, suppose the London County Council were to 
 take over the vehicular traffic of the Metropolis, reduce 
 the hours of the men employed in it, and thus make 
 room for a large body of the unemployed. It is evi- 
 dent that one effect of such action might be to bring 
 into the Metropolis all the unemployed and the dis- 
 satisfied from all corners of the kingdom. Even to 
 announce the intention of such action might bring a 
 very formidable influx of unemployed and destitute 
 people into London. Whenever the Count\ r Council 
 comes to consider this subject, with a view to giving 
 Londoners a thoroughly good service of vehicles, and 
 improving the condition of the tens of thousands em- 
 ployed in it and we all know they have already 
 taken one step in this direction this difficulty will 
 have to be faced, and the aid of the central Govern- 
 ment will have to be invoked. The obvious way of 
 dealing with the matter will be to set up counter 
 attractions in other parts of the kingdom, and probably 
 the best way of doing this, when London has definitely 
 resolved to have control of its vehicles, will be for 
 Government to call upon all the towns in the king- 
 dom, having over a certain population, to do the same, 
 to adopt the same hours of labour, and the same scale 
 of pay, leaving all the details and all the management
 
 PUBLIC WORK WELL DONE. m 
 
 to local authorities. This would prevent any rush on 
 London, and throughout the kingdom it would give em- 
 ployment to the unemployed, and thus send a new 
 life current through every great centre of population. 
 One large experiment of this kind might be sufficient 
 for some years, during which experience would be 
 gained, and the public would acquire confidence in 
 the merits of public control as compared with private 
 enterprise. 
 
 Localise all effort of this kind as far as possible, 
 and invoke the interference of " the State " only where 
 it is indispensable, and you minimise the chances of 
 jobbery and corruption by keeping industrial con- 
 cerns within manageable proportions, and under the 
 eye of those most deeply and most directly concerned 
 in them.
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 WILL IT EXTINGUISH " ENTERPRISE " ? 
 
 I HAVE, I think, now touched on most of the more 
 common objections to the advance of public control, and 
 if I have not succeeded in carrying to the mind of the 
 reader a conviction of the salutary and beneficent 
 character of the movement, I have, at least, I hope, 
 been able to show that those of us who avow our ad- 
 herence to the principle are not to be regarded as 
 necessarily actuated by a mere turbulent desire for 
 change, by any mere evil-spirited disposition to level 
 down, or even by the mere rancour of ignorance. 
 The principle we advocate we take to be the principle 
 of law and order and harmony, working beneficially, 
 not for one class only, but for all classes, promoting 
 everything that is highest and best and purest in 
 life. 
 
 There yet remain, however, one or two points of 
 some importance to which I think it would be well 
 to give some little attention. To Englishmen, more 
 perhaps than to any people under the sun, the ideas 
 which we commonly express by "push" and "pluck" 
 and "enterprise," is a very favourite and fascinat- 
 ing one. We are great admirers of the man who be- 
 gins life with nothing at all and fights his way upwards 
 to commercial fortune and social prominence. Such a 
 
 112
 
 WILL IT EX TING U1SH ' ' ENTERPRISE " ? 113 
 
 man seems to be the very embodiment of the individu- 
 alist principle, and so much of English prosperity and 
 power is quite manifestly due to such men, that very 
 wisely people generally distrust any movement which 
 seems likely either to limit the sphere open to them, 
 or to weaken any of the influences tending to produce 
 them. And that same feeling with respect to indi- 
 vidual men is very largely entertained with respect 
 to all bodies of men given to any form of commercial 
 undertaking. The daring, the persistence, the vigour 
 of English trade are our especial pride, and that our 
 railways, our shipping, our mining and manufactures 
 are all the outcomes of private adventure is, un- 
 doubtedly, a fact of which we have great reason to be 
 proud. It is indisputable evidence that, as a people, 
 we have great and masterful qualities, that we are 
 bold, energetic, self-reliant, mentally and physically, 
 vigorous, and pushing. 
 
 Now, he would be only a shallow-pated philosopher 
 who should endeavour in the slightest degree to dis- 
 parage or make light of the value of these qualities 
 of mind and body. It is quite true that our com- 
 mercial enterprise in the past has been characterised 
 by much that it is very shocking to look back upon, 
 to say nothing of what is going on at the present 
 time. As everybody knows, there are passages in the 
 history of our Indian Empire, the greatest of all our 
 commercial adventures, that make one positively 
 ashamed of his species, and there are features of our 
 industrial rivalry with Ireland that cannot but make 
 any honest reader of the history of that unhappy 
 country burn with indignation. The condition of the
 
 1 14 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 labouring and manufacturing population of Lanca- 
 shire, and of the mining districts at the beginning of 
 this century, can never be looked back upon by re- 
 spectable Englishmen without shame ; and, indeed, 
 one cannot look very closely into the conditions of 
 much of the industry around us at this moment with- 
 out getting sick at heart and feeling a strong disposi- 
 tion to denounce commerce as altogether cruel, and 
 unjust, and infamous. 
 
 But, after all, this phase of commercial affairs in 
 England is but a very partial one, and there are other 
 characteristics of it all that have justly made England 
 the admiration of the world, and have put the English 
 race foremost among the nations, and if we are to 
 continue to hold our position there it will be only by 
 the exercise of the same self-reliance and vigour, the 
 same indomitable energy, the same boldness of enter- 
 prise that have borne us to the front. It would be a 
 fatal mistake to do any thing calculated to impair these 
 qualities in Englishmen. 
 
 But really nobody proposes to do anything of the 
 kind. From much of the criticism with which the 
 advocates of collective effort are met, it might be 
 imagined that they were proposing that some outside 
 power should come and do for Englishmen what the 
 Jesuits did for the inhabitants of Paraguay in the last 
 century. The reader possibly may know nothing of 
 this remarkable experiment of the Jesuits. It is 
 worth a brief notice here as an excellent illustration 
 of the absurd notions entertained by many people 
 about the aims and objects of modern Socialism in this 
 country : The people of Paraguay, when they were
 
 WILL IT EX TING UISH ' ' ENTERPRISE "f 115 
 
 found by the Jesuit missionaries, appear to have been 
 simply gentle savages, living in caves, supplying their 
 wants mainly by the chase ; and were very much at 
 the mercy of surrounding tribes. The astute Church- 
 men found them here far removed from all the dis- 
 turbing influences of the Old World civilisation, in a 
 land wonderfully fertile, and soon perceived that they 
 were a people naturally docile and amenable to autho- 
 rity. They got a number of them together, supplied 
 them with food and clothes, taught them to construct 
 comfortable little huts, set up a magnificent church, 
 and, above all, drilled and trained them, and showed 
 them how to fortify themselves against their enemies. 
 All this, accompanied by such methods as the Jesuits 
 knew well how to exercise for the impression of the 
 unsophisticated savage, and combined, it is only fair 
 to say, with heroic self-sacrifice whenever needed, 
 soon enabled the missionaries to establish an absolute 
 domination over the simple folk, and they submitted 
 with implicit confidence to the benevolent despotism 
 of their teachers. Their community grew apace and 
 soon became a model of order and regularity. Per- 
 fect uniformity was observed in its long comfortable 
 rows of houses, and the small circuit of its little town- 
 ships afforded every facility for preserving domestic 
 tranquillity, or ensuring a ready defence against out- 
 side danger. In every little town there was a great 
 square in the centre, the public resoit and the general 
 rendezvous. Upon it were erected a church, a college, 
 an arsenal, stores, workshops, and other public build- 
 ings, all under the close and unceasing vigilance of 
 the fathers. The community lived and moved with
 
 II 6 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 the precision of clockwork. The people prayed and 
 toiled and slept by time table; from one duty or 
 employment they passed to another like soldiers 
 changing guard, all equally participating in the 
 changes of the day, each one undergoing his measure 
 of fatigue for the common good. 
 
 To have gone into the midst of a savage people, and 
 to have elaborated them into such an organisation of 
 soldiers and skilled craftsmen was indeed a stupen- 
 dous achievement. Had the Jesuit fathers understood 
 a little better what really makes a man, and had 
 they moreover really wished to make men instead of 
 obedient children of the Church, possibly they might 
 have built up a young State in Paraguay that would 
 have been an enduring centre of civilisation and 
 liberty. The fathers were decidedly too fatherly for 
 that. For a time, however, there seems every reason 
 to believe that the success and prosperity of the com- 
 munity were simply marvellous. Regulated liberty, 
 abundant supplies of all the necessaries of life, a 
 pleasant and comfortable house for each family, peace, 
 union, concord everywhere. These were pronounced 
 to be the characteristic features of the "Christian 
 Republic." Charity, sobriety, and calm, peaceful en- 
 enjoyment of life prevailed universally among the 
 people of Paraguay under the Jesuits. The culti- 
 vation of music and dancing, martial processions and 
 tournaments, with prizes for the victors, afforded 
 amusement, and religious pageants on special occa- 
 sions were provided to satisfy the popular craving for 
 novelty and sensuous enjoyment, and to keep before 
 their eyes symbols of higher ideals. An equal balance
 
 WILL IT EX TING UISH ' ' ENTERPRISE " ? 117 
 
 of mind and body was described as the ideal of the 
 Jesuit fathers, and to this ideal they apparently at- 
 tained to a really marvellous degree. At the end of 
 fifty years their communities numbered 100,000 In- 
 dians, and even Voltaire, with all his prejudice against 
 the Church, and all its ways and works, was fain to 
 admit that the " Christian Republic," as it was called, 
 came very near to the triumph of humanity ; and to its 
 founders it, of course, appeared to presage the renova- 
 tion of the world. They had practically solved the great 
 social problem, and nothing was needed but that the 
 nations of Europe should hasten to assimilate their 
 Government to that of the Christian Republic. 
 
 Of course it was an entire delusion. A strong and 
 enduring social system can be built up not by a strong 
 government, but only by a strong people. The 
 government of the Jesuits was vigorous and capable 
 enough, but the people were mere children, and when 
 these Catholic missionaries were driven out of the 
 country, the whole thing tumbled to pieces, and that 
 which had seemed a model for the world became 
 only a memory and a warning. 
 
 Now this so-called Republic of the Jesuits in South 
 America very nicely illustrates the kind of thing 
 which many persons suppose must inevitably result 
 from subjecting one thing after another to "State" 
 control. The State is to do this, the State is to do 
 that, the State is to do the other thing. We are all 
 going to be drilled, and directed, and managed, and 
 controlled. Nothing will be left to our own enter- 
 prise, our own skill and daring, our own pluck and 
 energy. Everything is to be done for us. Just as
 
 n8 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 the Spanish Jesuits managed the South American 
 Indians, so many appear to think that we shall by and 
 by be managed by "the State," and all the self- 
 reliance, and invention, and enterprise of Englishmen 
 will be lost if somebody does not succeed in stemming 
 this rising tide of Governmental interference. 
 
 I suppose, however, that everybody can see that if 
 instead of the foreign Jesuits going into Paraguay 
 and building up this civilisation for them, the people 
 of Paraguay had built it up for themselves if the 
 whole impulse and enterprise of the thing had come 
 from among these Indians ; if they had conceived this 
 higher life, had hammered out their own measures, 
 beaten their own paths, had picked out their own 
 leaders, and developed the whole social system for 
 themselves, the ultimate issue might have been totally 
 different. Whether some small proportion of the 
 people the leaders and managers among them had 
 made large private fortunes or not, nobody could have 
 said they were wanting in enterprise or energy, in 
 pluck and spirit, however highly developed their 
 social and industrial organisation might have been. 
 
 Now that, of course, is precisely our position. We 
 are not going to bring in Spanish Jesuits, or Russian 
 popes, or Roman cardinals to carry on the development 
 of our social system. We are doing it ourselves, and 
 it is mere folly to suppose that, in a social order, con- 
 stantly becoming more intricate, more elaborately 
 organised, there will be less demand for every kind of 
 human faculty. The more we organise and systema- 
 tise, the more indispensably necessary will be the 
 men who can originate, and plan, and arrange, and
 
 WILL IT EXTINGUISH ' ' EN TER PRISE " ? 119 
 
 direct. No doubt it is true that, as one after another 
 the great industries of the kingdom come under public 
 regulation and management, unscrupulous speculators, 
 mere daring adventurers with other people's money, 
 bubble company promoters, and all the heartless crew 
 of blood-suckers who live upon other people's earnings 
 without themselves ever contributing the value of a 
 brass button to the general wealth it is true that 
 people of this class may find their sphere of operations 
 greatly reduced. But for honest men of bold con- 
 ception, of ready initiative, of practical sagacity, and 
 indomitable energy, for men of courage and resource, 
 men of light and leading in all grades of society, 
 depend upon it there will alwa3 7 s be abundant oppor- 
 tunity, and the more highly organised society be- 
 comes, the greater will be the demand for their special 
 talents. 
 
 We talk fine things about business enterprise, and 
 in its highest and best developments it really is worthy 
 of our greatest respect and admiration. The genuine 
 thing is among our most precious national characteris- 
 tics. It has built our commercial navies and founded 
 our colonies, it has created our railways and developed 
 our trade and manufactures, it has set going our printing 
 press, and at the present moment is preparing another 
 peaceful revolution by means of electricity. Under 
 no circumstances whatever can we afford to impair 
 this great national characteristic our business enter- 
 prise. 
 
 But while we accord enthusiastic appreciation of 
 the real thing, let us be careful to distinguish it from 
 the sham and shoddy article so commonly mistaken
 
 120 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 for it. Where is the merit of nine-tenths of the 
 " pushing enterprise " of our ordinary shopkeepers for 
 instance ? What does it very commonly consist in ? 
 Here, within a mile or so of where I am writing, is 
 a very active business neighbourhood. One of its 
 most enterprising tradesmen has just pushed a hand- 
 bill into my letter-box, in which he strongly recom- 
 mends me to take advantage of his unrivalled assort- 
 ment of goods which he is disposing of at twenty, 
 thirty, and forty per cent, under cost price. Whether 
 it is true or false that he is doing so, is it satis- 
 factory business ? Is it commendable enterprise ? 
 If it is true, somebody must be smarting for it or 
 will have to do so. If it is false, here is a pro- 
 minent tradesman pushing his business by systematic 
 lies. 
 
 Within a stone's throw of the establishment of this 
 philanthropic worthy is a large shop, the proprietors 
 of which are trying to lure in customers by a start- 
 ling display of poor hungry-looking wretches dressed 
 up in fantastic costume, and kept all day long pacing 
 up and down the roadway, with big braggadocio 
 boards on their backs. The object of this bold ex- 
 penditure is to create an impression, that if the 
 public want certain articles, that is really the only 
 shop they ought to go to. As Mr. Bellamy says, how- 
 ever the wording may vary, the tenor of all these 
 appeals is the same : " Help John Jones, never mind 
 the rest. They are frauds. I, John Jones, am the 
 right one. Buy of me. Employ me. Visit me. 
 Hear me, John Jones ; loo^ at me. Make no mistake. 
 John Jones is the man and nobody else. Let the
 
 WILL IT EXTINGUISH "ENTERPRISE " ? 121 
 
 rest starve, but for God's sake remember John 
 Jones ! " 
 
 All very admirable, isn't it neighbourly, generous, 
 just, refined ? Of course it may be said that it is 
 all understood, and doesn't really deceive anybody. 
 If so, it only shows that this vulgar bragging and 
 boasting, this crude and repulsive self-assertion is to 
 a large extent as futile and foolish as it is coarse 
 and degrading. But whether it does deceive any- 
 body, or whether it doesn't, there the thing is 
 mere blatant vulgarity, mere shameless lying ; and 
 this is very largely characteristic of what passes for 
 business enterprise. Here is another large shop with 
 its windows choked up with " special lines," and 
 their walls all ablaze with sensational posters. They 
 have bought up the entire stock of a bankrupt, 
 sixty per cent, under cost price, and they are holding 
 a grand sale. Oh, brilliant enterprise ! Oh, admir- 
 able English spirit ! The big house with its ready- 
 money has had the good fortune to find a brother 
 tradesman on his beam ends, and, as one of them 
 elegantly expresses it, there is no damned sentiment 
 in business. They have taken the utmost advantage 
 of him. The poor wretch may go and hang himself, 
 and his creditors may whistle for their money, but 
 here are we, a go-ahead firm, with plenty of cash ; we 
 have cleverly snapped up his goods at less than half 
 what they are honestly worth, and if you will only 
 come in and buy, upon our honour as respectable 
 tradesmen, we will share the plunder with you ! 
 Everybody knows that something of that kind is 
 quite a common thing, and that it fairly represents
 
 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 another large proportion of what is called " enter- 
 Uprise." It is not cleverness or skill, it is not industry, 
 / it is not perseverance under difficulty, it is not fore- 
 ( sight ; it is simply the possession of means to take 
 \ advantage of other people. Here is another large 
 house set up in the midst of this busy neighbour- 
 hood, and for a time, at all events, is running away 
 with everybody's custom. Splendid enterprise, a 
 roaring trade, a most unequivocal success ! And what 
 is the secret of it all ? In the first place, they appeal- 
 to have abundant capital which, for aught I know, 
 may have been won in lucky speculation on the turf, 
 as is currently reported to have been the case with 
 another big business almost facing it they have 
 abundance of capital, they have spent large amounts 
 in puffing and bragging about the cheapness and 
 quality of their goods ; and, beyond this, I am assured 
 that their one secret of success is the old dodge of 
 selling under cost price a few articles of which the 
 value is known, and putting on an extra profit upon 
 goods of which the precise value their ordinary cus- 
 tomers cannot know. Almost any average business 
 locality will afford numerous instances of a similar 
 ' resort to a kind of low cunning. 
 
 Now, it is not worth while, perhaps, to make too 
 much of this sort of thing. I am very far from 
 saying that trade generally is carried on by such 
 methods, and even those who do adopt them I am 
 not disposed to denounce as rogues or impostors or 
 anything else that is very dreadful. To come fairly 
 up to the standard of morality prevailing around him 
 is, perhaps, as much as can be expected of the average
 
 WILL IT EXTINGUISH ' ' ENTERPRISE " ? \ 23 
 
 tradesman, and to puff yourself into notoriety at the 
 expense of your neighbour, to issue sensational and 
 misleading statements about your goods and your 
 prices, to buy in the cheapest market, quite regardless 
 of the circumstances of the man who sells, to delude 
 your customer into the belief that he is getting some- 
 thing cheap, when, if he only knew as much as you 
 do, he would be aware that he is paying rather dearly 
 all such things are, I know, generally regarded as 
 " business," as mere trade customs ; they are recog- 
 nised and winked at as mere phases of commercial 
 " enterprise," and are in some measure excused by the 
 great and increasing pressure of competition. I am 
 not referring to this mendacious bragging and boast- 
 ing, this sharp practice and petty deception in any 
 severely censorial spirit. I merely wish to point out 
 how largely this sort of thing enters into what we 
 call the enterprise, the vigour, the pluck, and push, 
 and go of the ordinary successful shopkeeper. Surely 
 we need not be greatly concerned if coming changes 
 should make a clean sweep of it all. 
 
 " For a' that, and a' that,- 
 
 It's coming yet for a' that, 
 That man to man the wide warld o'er 
 Shall brothers be for a' that." 
 
 Aye, aye, but not while man stands to man in a,n 
 attitude of unscrupulous antagonism of lies and petty 
 trickery. All shoddy enterprise this. The real thing 
 the knowledge of business, the intelligent manage- 
 ment, the grasp of details, the power of organisation, 
 the keen eye for improvement in method, the honour-
 
 124 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 able dealing that wins confidence, the resourcefulness 
 that is ever ready to devise new plans for public con- 
 venience these are the factors in real business enter- 
 prise, and depend upon it these will always find their 
 place and will command their reward, not, it may be, 
 in large fortunes, but in comfort and competency, in 
 assured positions of honour and influence.
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 SMALL SHOPKEEPING. 
 
 ANOTHER phase of business enterprise is presented in 
 the small tradesman, the shopkeeper who has not the 
 capital or the qualifications for any very aggressive 
 commercial warfare, but just manages to hold his own 
 and to make some sort of a living. There are tens of 
 thousands of such people in London. 
 
 In previous chapters I have endeavoured to show 
 that the changes rapidly coming about are already 
 rendering the position of the small tradesmen more 
 and more difficult, and that eventually they must ex- 
 tinguish him altogether. To many minds this, of 
 course, must seem very deplorable, and, no doubt, 
 there are some respects in which it really is to be 
 deplored. It is always so with great changes, how- 
 ever beneficent they may be upon the whole. It is 
 an ill wind that blows nobody any good, and it is a 
 good wind that blows nobody any ill. A snug, 
 prosperous little business is no doubt an excellent 
 thing, and wherever it exists most of us would 
 probably prefer to let it prosper. Even where small 
 shops are not as thriving as could be wished, it may 
 be said that at least they afford the means of living 
 honestly and respectably. We would rather let them 
 alone. But whatever may be our individual prefer- 
 
 125
 
 126 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 cnccs, tlic.se great, sweeping, social forces we have been 
 discussing appear to take little heed of the snug 
 prosperity of the individual. They surge on in 
 stately unconcern towards the common good, not heed- 
 ing the benefit of this person or of that person, of 
 tliis class or of that class, but only what is for the 
 real advantage of all. 
 
 " Arc find and Nature then at strife, 
 
 That Nature lends such evil dreams ? 
 So careful of the type she seems, 
 So careless of the single life." 
 
 No. That which is good for the whole community, 
 worked out to its final issues, will be found to be best 
 for each individual. Clearly it is to the advantage of 
 the community as a whole that all sorts of goods sold 
 in shops all other things being equal shall be 
 manufactured and sold at the lowest possible price. 
 The whole drift of things, as I have already endea- 
 voured to show, tends in that direction. Scientific 
 discovery, mechanical invention, the higher social 
 organisation, are all rapidly tending to cheapen pro- 
 duction and distribution, and to the curtailment of 
 necessary effort, and the mitigation of drudgery, and 
 though at present much of the advantage of it all is 
 appropriated by the capitalist and the middleman, the 
 ultimate issues of these changes must rectify that 
 also ; business will be carried on for the good of all, 
 and this eventually must benefit every individual. 
 Whatever is wasteful, whatever system involves 
 needless burdens, useless drudgery, is irrevocably 
 doomed to extinction.
 
 SMALL SHOPKEEP1NG. 127 
 
 Now, of course, everybody capable of the least 
 observation must perceive that our system of small 
 shops is ridiculously wasteful in every way, and the 
 time will assuredly come when the idea of a dozen 
 small tradesmen, each incurring all the expenses of a 
 separate establishment, each eager to do the same \ 
 trade in the same neighbourhood, each studying the \ 
 same little arts for damaging his rivals and enticing 
 customers into his own little den, each devoting all 
 his time and attention from early morning till late at 
 night, and all the dozen put together doing all day 
 long only as much business as one really well man- 
 aged house could do between the hours of ten an 1 
 four the time will come when all this will be some- 
 thing to be merry over. It will seem so ridiculously 
 short-sighted, so unreflecting and puerile. What is it 
 that these twelve men are doing ? What is their 
 part in the great social machine ? They are simply 
 distributors. They are mediums between those who 
 produce and those who consume. A certain number 
 of people require to be supplied with a certain 
 quantity of goods, and, speaking generally, if the 
 public can get satisfactorily supplied with what they 
 require, it does not matter at all whether there is one 
 distributor or a dozen. There will be no more goods 
 supplied for having a dozen men all struggling one 
 against the other for the privilege of supplying them. 
 It is quite obvious that to have a dozen of them all 
 scrambling after the business that could be just as 
 well done by one is wasteful in many ways a waste 
 of superintendence, a waste of time, a waste of shop 
 rent, a \va.ste of incidental expenses, such as gas,
 
 128 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 light, and assistance, and perhaps a great deal of 
 sheer waste in the way of advertisements, of no 
 earthly use except to divert trade from one shop to 
 another. 
 
 Now clearly the most reasonable and economical 
 way of effecting this distribution of goods would be 
 to set up one first-rate establishment in each neigh- 
 bourhood; to pick out the most competent of the 
 dozen men and put him in as manager, giving the 
 others, or as many as were required, subordinate 
 positions according to their several special qualifica- 
 tions. With ample capital and thorough organisation, 
 the business would be done more efficiently, more 
 economically, and with far less time and trouble. In 
 such an arrangement there need be no waste of force 
 whatever. 
 
 But my reader perhaps doesn't like the look of this 
 at all. The economy of it is evident enough, but it is 
 not all advantage. These twelve were formerly their 
 own masters, now they have all become servants. 
 They have lost their independence, they have given 
 up their liberty. And there is another thing. As 
 independent tradesmen each of them had some sort of 
 a chance of making a fortune ; under this arrange- 
 ment the utmost either of them can ever hope to do 
 is to make a pretty comfortable living, and perhaps 
 to save a little by very careful economy. Their 
 incomes, perhaps, will not be all alike, but the best 
 of them has not the remotest chance of dying a 
 millionaire. 
 
 In a previous chapter, and in other connections, I 
 have already discussed these points. What we really
 
 SMALL SHOPKEEPING. 129 
 
 want is not to afford chances for one man in ten 
 thousand to die a millionaire, but for the whole ten 
 thousand to live in a fair degree of comfort and 
 prosperity, and this, as I have again and again 
 insisted on, is really the solution of the social problem 
 that the whole course of events is rapidly bringing 
 about. Just as machinery is everywhere superseding 
 hand labour in production, so the evolution of our 
 social organisation is superseding these small and 
 inefficient methods of distribution. Whether we 
 approve of it or not, this transference of the work 
 both of production and distribution from a large 
 number of small concerns to a small number of large 
 ones is being rapidty effected, not consciously or 
 intentionally by us, but by the pressure of economic 
 forces that it is simply useless to attempt to resist. 
 At present, the public advantage of this is not very 
 obvious ; it is not at all commensurate with the 
 anxiety and trouble and even real suffering involved 
 in these changes. A great many persons are thrown 
 out of employment altogether, while the employes of 
 these great concerns work long hours for low wages, 
 and the prices of commodities to the public have not 
 always become very appreciably lower for all the econ- 
 omies effected. This is because the changes we are 
 discussing have not yet worked themselves out to 
 their ultimate issues. Between the actual workers 
 and their real employers, the public, the capitalist 
 still stands to take toll. Pie is at present the real 
 master of the situation, and to a great extent can 
 dictate the prices the public shall pay for their goods 
 and the working hours and wages of his employe's.
 
 130 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 But he, though he is unconscious of it, is working 
 steadily on towards his own extinction. He is, as I 
 have already pointed out, working on towards mono- 
 poly, and monopoly, when it is finished, bringeth forth 
 public control and a system of distribution compared 
 with which our present small shop system will be 
 referred back to as an amusing illustration of the 
 very rudimentary ideas of social economy prevailing 
 at the close of the nineteenth century. 
 
 Looked at from one point of view, much of our 
 shopkeeping presents something of a comedy. There 
 is another point from which too often it will be found 
 to be little short of a tragedy. Look at those twelve 
 men we have been talking about. They are most of 
 them probably men with wives and families and 
 homes dependent upon them ; they are hampered by 
 want of capital, continually worried by the vicissitudes 
 of trade, the shifting of population, the risks of credit, 
 the stress of competition, the difficulty of getting in 
 money and of meeting bills. Everybody who knows 
 anything of the smaller businesses of London and all 
 large towns and small towns, too, for that matter 
 knows that this is not an inaccurate description of the 
 circumstances under which a large proportion of the 
 trade of the country is carried on crushing burdens 
 of worry and anxiety, absorbing cares, a wretched 
 waste of life and strength in wrestling with difficulties 
 that, under any rational system of things, ought never 
 to exist, and, with all their care and anxiety and effort, 
 only a very limited proportion of shopkeepers ever 
 rise to an assured and comfortable position. By far 
 the larger part find it an incessant struggle for a bare
 
 SMALL SHOPKEEPING. 131 
 
 living, and the cases in which honest and well-meaning 
 men drop out of the ranks beaten and ruined are so 
 common as to attract little attention. Here and there 
 a small business thrives and grows and becomes a big 
 one. These are the cases that fill the eye and occupy 
 the thoughts when we speak of business enterprise. 
 We soon forget the enterprise that fails and dies out 
 in defeat and life-long ruin. There stands the big 
 business that has grown out of a small one, a monu- 
 ment of what may be done by individual industry 
 and perseverance, courage and skill, energy and good 
 management. But for every signal success like that 
 at least a score of cases may be instanced in which 
 the attempt to embark in shopkeeping has resulted in 
 the melting away of the little capital, the wasting of 
 no small part of a lifetime, the disappointment of all 
 sorts of hopes, in the frustration of all sorts of plans, 
 and in final defeat. But all this leaves no great 
 monument behind. The unsuccessful shopkeeper re- 
 tires into obscurity, his name is painted off the shop 
 front, and the world scrambles on as though he had 
 never been there. From him it learns no lesson. If 
 the teaching of his experience could be brought home 
 to the public apprehension as effectually as that of 
 the successful trader, the world might soon be brought 
 to alter its estimate of the value of " business enter- 
 prise" as a training system for character, and the 
 promotion of the real good to the individual.
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 PIONEERS OF ENTERPRISE. 
 
 BUT let us get back for a moment to the larger and 
 bolder phases of English enterprise alluded to in the 
 last chapter but one that which displays itself in 
 the construction of railways, and water works, great 
 electrical installations and huge factories. Under- 
 takings such as these strike the imagination, and at 
 times profoundly impress us all with a sense of the 
 consummate audacity of the British capitalist and the 
 incalculable benefits he confers on society at large. 
 So manifest is our indebtedness to the private enter- 
 prise of the past that it is not surprising that the mere 
 suggestion of anything that looks to be antagonistic 
 to it should, by the generality of people, be scouted as 
 folly. Look, you say, at our vast railway systems, our 
 mining industries, our tremendous iron works, our 
 docks and ships and factories, and a thousand other 
 things. To what do we owe them all ? Why, to the 
 grit and pluck and daring, the dogged tenacity and 
 unconquerable determination of English enterprise. 
 There is nothing shoddy about this at all events. It 
 is all as sterling as English sovereigns. Put down 
 this splendid spirit of self-reliance and what are you 
 going to put in the place of it ? It is the very main- 
 spring of human progress. Weaken and impair this 
 
 132
 
 PIONEERS OF ENTERPRISE. 133 
 
 mainspring and the social machinery at once begins 
 to slacken its speed; destroy it altogether, and the 
 machinery stops dead. 
 
 Well, it is all quite true. But you know in all, or 
 nearly all, our greatest industrial developments now- 
 adays there are two distinct sets of people concerned 
 those who find the money and those who find the 
 brains. Which of these two sets of people are you 
 talking about ? The capitalist and the trader, or the 
 manufacturer in the olden days of small concerns, used 
 to be one and the same person. A man beat out his 
 own path, used his own money, managed his own 
 business, and pocketed his own profits. When in 
 those days people talked about business enterprise and 
 the importance of individualism, they knew exactly 
 what they were talking about. They knew their men 
 and understood their characters, and saw their flour- 
 ishing businesses, and they knew how much depended 
 upon their resourcefulness and prudence, and know- 
 ledge of the world and of trade. In their own petty 
 spheres they were men of might and mettle, and the 
 welfare of the whole community evidently depended 
 on them to a very large extent. But in these modern 
 times " enterprise " has become a totally different 
 thing. Much of it has become, and all of it is becom- 
 ing, too vast for the individual. It assumes the form 
 of great organisations requiringa combination of capital 
 and a division of labour. " He hath an argosy bound 
 to Tripolis," says Shy lock, " another to the Indies ; I 
 understand, moreover, upon the Rialto he hath a third 
 at Mexico, a fourth for England, and other ventures 
 he hath squandered abroad." There is the merchant
 
 134 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 of the Middle Ages. All these "argosies" he has 
 built with his own money, sent out on his own risk, 
 and upon their fortunes with winds and waves and 
 pirates he stands or falls. If Antonio had lived in 
 England at the present time, he would, perhaps, have 
 been chairman of the P. & O.. the head of a Board 
 of Directors whose huge steamships upwards of fifty 
 of them averaging nearly 4,000 tons each come and 
 go with the regularity of railway trains, who never 
 think of winds and waves but only of insurance rates 
 and the price of coal, and who are administering funds 
 in which they may have comparatively quite a small 
 share. 
 
 Now, it is from those olden times that we have in- 
 herited many of our notions about business. We 
 keep on talking just as our forefathers have done> 
 about energy, and industry, and enterprise, and all 
 the rest of the good old copy-book mercantile virtues, 
 and all the time we have in mind pretty much the 
 same thing that our forefathers had. We are apt 
 entirely to overlook the fact that whereas formerly 
 the capitalist was himself the pioneer, the man of 
 enterprise and skill, of daring and determination, he 
 is not necessarily anything of the kind nowadays. 
 Take a railway like the Great Western for instance. 
 You have on the one hand the whole body of share- 
 holders, and on the other you have all those who are 
 engaged, or have been engaged, in the construction 
 and maintenance and management of the line. In 
 which of these two bodies of people do you find the 
 enterprise that so justly excites your admiration ? 
 The shareholders, you know, number somewhere
 
 PIONEERS OF ENTERPRISE. 135 
 
 about eighty thousand people business men, retired 
 array and navy officers, clergymen, invalids, very 
 aged persons, widows, ladies, and even children. To 
 talk of the pluck and vigour, the foresight, the reso- 
 lution, the enterprise of such a body of people is 
 manifestly absurd. No doubt there are a good many 
 of these shareholders who have never seen the Great 
 Western Railway, and know absolutely nothing about 
 it. Even the original shareholders those who came 
 forward with their money when the line was first 
 projected were many of them totally ignorant of the 
 merits of the scheme, and were quite incapable of 
 judging of its practicability. They knew nothing 
 about railway schemes, but they had some money, for 
 which they wanted to find a paying investment, and 
 their lawyers, or their brokers, or their friends, re- 
 commended Great Westerns, or they happened to know 
 somebody who had invested in them. A large part 
 of these original shareholders were, of course, mere 
 speculators, who " bought for a rise," and would have 
 shown just as much " enterprise " in promoting a 
 railway to the moon, if they had seen the smallest 
 chance of " bulling " their shares a little and clearing 
 out at a profit. Attentively examined, much of this 
 fine thing that we are so terribly afraid of damaging 
 proves to be nothing very great, nothing very admir- 
 able in any way. It resolves itself simply into an 
 investment of money which promises a good return, 
 and such an investment is quite consistent with the 
 possibility that the investor may have neither pluck 
 nor spirit, nor foresight, nor energy, nor anything else 
 that is respectable. He may be an arrant knave and
 
 136 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 a great fool. The whole body of the capitalists con- 
 cerned in the Great Western might be bought out 
 to-morrow, and no train need be five minutes late in 
 consequence. There would still be left in the con- 
 cern all the men of " enterprise," and initiative, and 
 " go," all the men of brains, of managing and organis- 
 ing ability. To them it would not matter a farthing 
 whether the shareholders were eighty thousand 
 private individuals or all the people in Great Britain 
 and Ireland. There would still be a Board of Direc- 
 tion, or something corresponding to it ; there would 
 still be a chairman, and a general manager, and 
 managers of departments, and superintendents, and 
 engineers, and minor officers ; and they would all be 
 actuated by just the same incentives to effort that 
 they are under now. They would still stand in awe 
 of public opinion; they would still have their incomes 
 at stake ; they would still have their promotion to 
 look to; they would still be anxious to maintain their 
 reputation for cleverness and capacity ; they would 
 still take pride in the efficiency of their departments ; 
 and not a few of them, let us hope, would continue to 
 be animated by a sturdy public spirit and a healthy 
 sense of duty to God and their fellowrnen, just as 
 many of them are now. 
 
 There are in this company nineteen directors, there 
 is a general manager, there are the responsible heads 
 of three great departments, and there is a working- 
 staff of about 45,000 men. My contention is that all 
 the business ability, all the skill and judgment, the 
 circumspection and prudence, all the energy and 
 enterprise for which we need concern ourselves, are to
 
 PIONEERS OF ENTERPRISE. 137 
 
 be found among these actual workers of the line, and 
 not among the eighty thousand shareholders. I am 
 aware, of course, that the shareholders not only find 
 the cash but do exercise a control. They elect the 
 directors, and periodically a small proportion of them 
 including some very clever men, and some who, to 
 put it mildly, are not very clever meet together to 
 hear the directors' report, to discuss the interests of 
 their property, to listen to new proposals, and to vote 
 upon them and so forth. Their power is, of course, 
 absolute ; but, naturally enough, it is generally exer- 
 cised under the influence and direction of the very 
 able men, who are the practical managers of the line, 
 and where this influence is resisted and overruled, it 
 will generally be found that the policy acted on is 
 one of mere shortsighted selfishness, and right in the 
 very teeth of public interests. The wisdom of the 
 shareholders is nowadays no more needed than their 
 cash. Their functions can be better performed by 
 public opinion. 
 
 " Yes," says the objector, " that is all very true. 
 I can see that so far as the mere management of a 
 railway is concerned it need make no difference 
 whether the proprietary body consists of shareholders 
 or the public. The work to be done would be practi- 
 cally the same, and it would be done by the same 
 people and in pretty much the same way. But that 
 is not quite what one understands by ' enterprise.' 
 It may be true that upon the responsible officers of great 
 systems such as these there is a certain demand for 
 new ideas and improved methods, and a really good, 
 go-ahead sort of man may find ample scope for the
 
 138 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 best of his powers in this way. It is clear, too, that 
 whoever may be his masters, his position may be 
 made to depend on his showing that he is equal to 
 the demand made upon him. If a railway manager 
 or the superintendent of a department does not show 
 a capability of moving with the times, he may, of 
 course, find himself superseded, whoever may own 
 the railway But it is not so clear that the ' enter- 
 prise' which conceives and carries out altogether new 
 schemes will be by any means so readily forthcoming. 
 Your Government department never invents anything. 
 It never originates any service, never strikes out a 
 new path, never moves at all if it can possibly help 
 it. Look at the Post-Office. Everybody knows that 
 it has stood right in the way of the development of 
 the telephone service of this country, and only the 
 other day, when a private company set up a boy 
 messenger service, the Postmaster-General stepped in 
 and did his best to put it down. It is true that he 
 raised a hornet's nest about his ears, and that the 
 public insisted that he should either do the business 
 himself or let somebody else; and it is true that when 
 he found that that was the temper of the public he at 
 once set about an express messenger service, and that 
 the thing is now in full working order. But we 
 should never have had it if private enterprise had not 
 led the way. And that is always the case. The fact 
 is, if you take away a man's chance of making a 
 fortune out of a new invention, or a new business, or 
 a new public service, you take away the great incen- 
 tive to action. Men invent, and discover, and strike 
 out new paths of public usefulness, because they hope
 
 PIONEERS OF ENTERPRISE. 139 
 
 for large rewards. Take away the chance of re- .' 
 ward and you take away the mainspring of enter- 
 prise." 
 
 One continually hears this line of argument in- 
 sisted on, though it is continually being refuted. As 
 regards the capabilities of Government, I have 
 already endeavoured to show that where industrial 
 enterprise apart from the naval and military has 
 been tried it has been attended by the happiest 
 results. It is true, of course, that Government de- 
 partments have never been given to striking out new 
 paths, pushing into new spheres of activity, or mak- 
 ing brilliant inventions. But the simple truth is, 
 that not only have they never been required to do so, 
 but they have always been positively forbidden. The 
 principle that has hitherto dominated governmental 
 conduct in such matters, has been to do as little as 
 possible. "Don't on any account undertake anything 
 new until the public clamour for it becomes irresis- 
 tible." No statesman, I think, would deny that that 
 has been the general rule obtaining everywhere, and 
 if that is so, how can it possibly be thought surprising 
 that Government departments show a want of enter- 
 prise ? 
 
 The trading public have always been extreme- 
 ly jealous of the least encroachment on the part 
 of Government. A few years ago, the Postmaster- 
 General brought out halfpenny post -cards. Im- 
 mediately all the manufacturing stationers in the 
 kingdom were up in arms. "The halfpenny is for 
 the postage," they said, " and you are, therefore, 
 charging nothing for the card. You are giving it
 
 140 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 away, and while people can get post-cards for nothing 
 they will not buy paper and envelopes as they have 
 been used to do. You are damaging trade." And 
 they compelled the Post-Office to charge sevenpence 
 and eightpence a dozen instead of sixpence. It must 
 be remembered too that no Government department 
 can do anything involving expenditure without the 
 sanction of the Treasury. That is quite right and 
 proper of course; but the Chancellor of the Exchequer 
 is himself answerable to Parliament and the public, 
 and hitherto the predominant public sentiment has 
 been dead against any sort of official activity likely to 
 clash with private enterprise. So long as that is the 
 case it is mere folly to taunt Government depart- 
 ments with being laggards in enterprise. Just re- 
 verse that, let it be the general desire of the people 
 at large that as fast as it can prudently be done 
 industry shall be organised on a public system, and 
 that the best Chancellor of the Exchequer is he who 
 most successfully promotes this movement, and this 
 reproach will speedily disappear. I don't positively 
 know how true it is, but at the time that Mr. Raikes 
 was getting unlimited abuse over that boy messenger 
 business to which allusion has just been made, I 
 heard it whispered in a quarter likely to be well 
 informed that it was all totally unmerited on his 
 part. He had all along been anxious to take up this 
 enterprise himself, but he could not get the Treasury 
 to consent to the necessary expenditure. I cannot 
 speak with any certain knowledge of the late Post- 
 master-General himself in relation to this matter, 
 but I can speak of some of his subordinates more im-
 
 PIONEERS OF ENTERPRISE. 141 
 
 mediately concerned in it, and I know that they 
 were quite prepared to undertake it, and that they 
 chafed a good deal under public criticism, which 
 represented their department as laggard and inconv 
 petent and behind the times. Every good public 
 servant naturally takes a pride in the efficiency of his 
 department and can have no greater stimulus than 
 the appreciation of the public he serves. The present 
 Postmaster- General has just announced his new 
 scheme for dealing with the telephones. He points 
 out that the telephone has made less progress in 
 England than in almost any other part of Europe. 
 The reasons he assigns for this appear to be two. 
 In the first place the various telephone companies 
 have nearly all been absorbed into the National Tele- 
 phone Company, and thus the public have lost the 
 benefit of competition ; and in the second place he 
 frankly admits that the Government has had to de- 
 fend its own telegraph monopoly by imposing such 
 burdensome conditions of license on the telephones as 
 have prevented their development. It has been 
 found that wherever telephones have largely de- 
 veloped, as they have done in some parts of Lanca- 
 shire and Yorkshire, the growth of the telegraphs has 
 been checked. The public revenue has been injured, 
 and that is the reason why the telephones have not 
 been allowed to develop as they might and should 
 have done. So far as the Post-Office is responsible 
 for retarding the newer system of electric communi- 
 cation it is not from any incompetency or because a 
 Government cannot keep up with the times. It is 
 attributable simply to the policy of the Treasury.
 
 142 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 Government has a big telegraphic business, and it has 
 hitherto been the practice to rely upon the profit of 
 that business for helping out the Chancellor of the 
 Exchequer with his budget. As soon as the public 
 choose to insist on the adoption of a different policy 
 they can do so. In the meantime it is simply foolish 
 to point to these things as warning examples of the 
 incompetency of Government departments to deal 
 with public business. The telegraphs upon the whole 
 are worked splendidly, and when the telephone ap- 
 peared on the scene the wise thing would have been 
 instead of first licensing a number of companies 
 to compete with the telegraphs and then imposing, 
 with the license, such terms and conditions as would 
 effectually cripple the competition the wise thing 
 would have been for the Government to take 
 over the telephone and to develop it them- 
 selves. If the thing had been taken in hand with 
 the same spirit and ability that have characterised 
 the working of the telegraphs for the past twenty 
 years, we should by this time have had a system 
 second to none, and we should have had another 
 illustration of what the Post-Office can do. But the 
 old prejudice against the assumption of anything that 
 could be done by private enterprise was allowed to 
 prevail ; a compromise was effected, and as the result, 
 we have a telephonic service lagging behind all the 
 civilised world, and an illustration of what the Post- 
 Office can't do in the way of keeping up with the 
 times. The unsatisfactory position of the telephone 
 in England is continually being referred to as prov- 
 ing the mischief of putting monopoly into the hands
 
 PIONEERS OF ENTERPRISE. 143 
 
 of Government. What it really does prove is the 
 mistake we made in not putting the monopoly of the 
 telephone into the hands of the Government in addi- 
 tion to that of the telegraph.
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 INVENTORS AND INVENTIONS. 
 
 BUT here another question will be sure to arise in the 
 minds of many readers. "How would you ever be 
 likely to get such things as the telephones you have 
 been talking about, if all the enterprise of a country 
 were parcelled out into so many Government or 
 municipal departments ?" "Surely," it will be said, " it 
 cannot be denied that our present competitive, free 
 trade system stimulates invention and calls forth new 
 ideas. Even granting that established activities may 
 with advantage be taken over by the State, or the 
 county, or the municipality, surely the possible gains 
 of private adventure are necessary to initiate these 
 activities and to prompt and encourage mechanical 
 and scientific inventions. If you keep on taking away 
 one after the other, all the chances of the great re- 
 wards of successful novelties, what are you going to 
 put in the place of them ? " 
 
 One may, I suppose, be allowed to watch with a 
 quiet eye the social currents swirling around him, to 
 mark their drift, and to give some of the results of 
 one's musings upon them, without necessarily being 
 required to elaborate a complete system for the 
 universe. As regards the encouragement of invention, 
 
 I am free to confess that I cannot foresee with any 
 
 144
 
 INVENTORS AND INVENTIONS. 145 
 
 great confidence what is likely to be the system of 
 the future. But of this I feel the greatest confidence, 
 that some system will have to be devised, and even 
 though it should be but a poor one, it will in all 
 probability be far better than anything we can boast 
 of at present. 
 
 That mechanical invention and scientific discovery 
 must on no account be neglected or discouraged, I 
 suppose most intelligent persons will readily agree. 
 Most of us, perhaps, are unconsciously inclined to 
 assume, when we look around on the amazing develop- 
 ments of science and mechanics of late years, that we 
 must surely be approaching something like finality. 
 It is difficult to conceive of the possibility of the in- 
 definite continuance of the progress we have been 
 making of late years. And yet, I suppose, all scientific 
 men will be quite unanimous in affirming that there 
 is not, as yet, the faintest indication of any boundary 
 line beyond which we cannot hope to go. They all 
 agree that we are only just on the threshold of the 
 electric age. What our homes will be, what our daily 
 lives will be, what our occupations will be by the end 
 of another generation no man can predict, but there 
 are unmistakable indications that human life may be 
 absolutely revolutionised. It seems at times as though 
 invention can really do but little more for us, and as 
 though the sphere of the inventor must be contracting. 
 On the contrary, it is widening out beyond the power 
 of imagination to realise. Look at this paragraph 
 from an article in the current number of the Nine- 
 teenth Century, by one of our cleverest electrical 
 engineers. He describes a recent discovery by another
 
 146 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 electrician, and he proceeds to say : " Should the 
 application of Mr. Tesla's results ever fulfil the bold 
 dreams of scientific imagination, we shall see a social 
 and political change at least as important as that 
 caused by the railway system or the electric telegraph. 
 Most manual labour will become unnecessary, as un- 
 limited power will be available at every man's hand. 
 Engineering works will be able to be carried out on a 
 far greater scale than has yet been ever contemplated, 
 and doubtless a corresponding era of material pros- 
 perity will set in ; but whether these dreams are ever 
 fulfilled or not, few who attended Mr. Tesla's lecture 
 will forget the possibilities which seemed to open to 
 their minds when they saw a living man standing in 
 the midst of the electric storm, receive unharmed in 
 his hands flashes of veritable lightning, and waving 
 above his head a tube, through which the very life- 
 blood of creation pulsed in waves of purple fire." 
 
 Now, if this were the only testimony of the kind, 
 one might be disposed to dismiss it without serious 
 attention. But such dreams are common to all our 
 leading scientists. So far from our having arrived at 
 finality in invention, they seem all agreed that we are 
 probably only just beginning, and it is obvious, there- 
 fore, that the relations between society and its in- 
 ventors is likely to be one of very great and increasing 
 importance. I do not intend to deal with the matter 
 at any length, much less do I propose to formulate any 
 system for the promotion and reward of inventions in 
 the future. But I may venture to throw out a few 
 suggestions on the subject. 
 
 In the first place, it is of course a mistake to suppose
 
 INVENTORS AND INVENTIONS. 147 
 
 that the hope of making a fortune is the only thing 
 that leads people to invent ; and if it were it would 
 be little short of iniquitous to encourage the hope, 
 because it is not realised once in a thousand times. 
 It is notorious that inventions are made by one set of 
 people and the fortunes are pocketed by another. 
 There are, I know, some conspicuous exceptions to 
 this, but comparatively speaking, they are very few. 
 Ninety-nine times out of a hundred the infatuated 
 inventor gives the best of his brains, any amount of 
 his time, and very often a great deal more money than 
 he can afford, in bringing out his invention, and then 
 if it is good for anything, the man of business steps 
 in and appropriates whatever is to be made out of it. 
 Very unlucky for the inventor, you say, but all the 
 same the public gets the benefit of the idea. That is 
 true, but it is not the whole truth. The man who has 
 invented one good thing, might, if he found it pay, go 
 on to invent another and another, for inventive talent, 
 like any other, is capable of development by exercise. 
 The inventive faculty is as distinct an endowment, as 
 easily recognisable, and as capable of cultivation and 
 training as the faculty of art or music, and considering 
 its value to the community, we should, if we were wise, 
 take the utmost pains not only to foster and encourage 
 it, but to direct it into the most promising and useful 
 channels. But there can be little doubt that if the 
 experience of all inventors could be canvassed on the 
 point, there would be found to be a general concensus 
 of opinion among those, at least, who are not in the 
 very front rank, that the career of an inventor is one 
 of the most discouraging, harassing, ill-requited lives
 
 148 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 that a man of brains can possibly engage in. Under 
 the present system of things the great prizes are so 
 few and far between, and so capriciously and unfairly 
 distributed, that it really is not worth a man's while 
 to compete for them. The hope of making a fortune 
 or even of getting a fair reward is generally a delusive 
 one, and shrewd men soon find that out and drop in- 
 vention for something more profitable. I have said 
 that it is a mistake to suppose that the hope of making 
 a fortune is the only thing that leads to inventions. 
 Many extremely important ones have been mere happy 
 thoughts have come, so to speak, quite spontaneously. 
 Others have arisen quite incidentally in the course of 
 scientific or mechanical investigations undertaken for 
 some totally different purpose. Then there are some 
 men in whom the inventive faculty is so strong, that 
 they indulge in it for the mere love of it, just as others 
 pursue music, or mathematics, or art. But even if it 
 were true that the chances of great prizes were the 
 only inducement to invent, it might, I venture to 
 think, still be worth while to sweep them away 
 altogether, if at the same time we could devise some 
 possible plan for publicly recognising and moderately 
 rewarding all inventions of real merit. It is easy to 
 conceive of a plan by which inventive ability would 
 be far more effectually developed and encouraged 
 than by the present hap-hazard system. It is with 
 rewards very much as it is with punishments 
 certainty is far more important than amount. Petty 
 thefts were common enough when hanging was the 
 penalty. Convictions were comparatively rare and 
 every thief hoped to escape. They might safely have
 
 INVENTORS AND INVENTIONS. 149 
 
 abolished hanging as the penalty for theft if it could 
 have been made certain that every thief would have 
 been caught and moderately punished. For just the 
 same reasons we need not fear to diminish or even to 
 abolish altogether the chances of making great fortunes 
 by novel inventions, if by any means we can devise a 
 system by which some little honour and a reasonable 
 reward may be secured to every man who benefits the 
 community by his cleverness and ingenuity. 
 
 We want, in short, in this matter, as in most others, 
 a more even and equitable distribution of rewards ; 
 more of the just and carefully managed apportioning 
 and less of the luck of a promiscuous scramble. Our 
 present system of rewarding inventions is monstrously 
 unfair. One man labours and waits and studies 
 patents this and patents that, spends his money and 
 his life in pursuing what proves to him a mere will- 
 o'-the-wisp. But all the time he is moving towards 
 some really valuable invention, and if he is not show- 
 ing the world how the thing he is aiming at can be 
 done, he is at least showing how it can't be which is 
 very often the actual preliminary to success. An- 
 other man comes in, picks up the thing when he has 
 wearily dropped it, takes the full benefit of all his 
 experience and goes in and wins. The history of 
 electricity during the past few years will illustrate 
 that over and over .again. Rewards often bear not 
 the smallest proportion to the merit that is supposed 
 to have earned them. For instance, I know an ex- 
 ceedingly clever inventor who has devised a plan for 
 coupling and uncoupling railway trucks. This is a 
 matter of really terrible importance, According to
 
 ISO THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 the Board of Trade returns, every day throughout the 
 year on the average, some poor fellow often enougli 
 the father of a young family is horribly maimed, 
 or crushed to death in the most frightful way. To 
 obviate this dreadful sacrifice of human life every 
 year should be a matter of national concern, and the 
 man who can successfully do it should be entitled to 
 national recognition and substantial reward. Well, 
 this inventor has unquestionably shown how it may 
 be done. By the expenditure of considerable sums of 
 money in models and experiments, he has shown how 
 the necessity for getting between the trucks in coup- 
 ling and uncoupling may be entirely done away with 
 and all these lives saved. The thing he has pro- 
 duced is inexpensive, and it has been practically 
 tried on more than one railway, and pronounced an 
 unequivocal success. There is no question about that, 
 it is admitted. But the reason why no railway will 
 adopt it is that the various companies are continually 
 interchanging vehicles, and the trucks of collieries and 
 other private owners also run over the railways, and 
 unless they were all built on a uniform plan, and all 
 fitted with this new coupling appliance, there would 
 often be difficulty and inconvenience. By and by the 
 State will, no doubt, acquire the railways, and will 
 work them on a uniform system. New trucks and 
 luggage- vans may be built all on the same lines, and 
 here is the coupling contrivance, which every ten 
 years will save more lives and limbs than have been 
 Jost in some of the bloodiest battles of Europe. And 
 what has this inventor got for his philanthropic 
 ingenuity, his anxious experimenting, his loss of time
 
 INVENTORS AND INVENTIONS. 151 
 
 and money, and all the worry and trouble incidental 
 to an attempt to move the great railway companies 
 in a matter of this sort? Not one penny piece. 
 There still goes on the ghastly procession of the 
 bearers of those crushed and mangled bodies to the 
 dead-house or the hospital, day after day and year 
 after year, and here is the simple but most ingenious 
 contrivance that would stop it. It is quite certain 
 that the time will come when the public conscience 
 will no longer endure this frightful sacrifice, but will 
 peremptorily insist that it shall be stopped, and 
 here are the means ready to hand for doing it. 
 But the inventor gets no reward, nor even thanks, 
 and probably never will do so. But now look at 
 another case. For a century and more scientific 
 men had been experimenting on the best methods 
 of converting iron into steel, and of course had 
 accumulated a great deal of knowledge and ex- 
 perience on the subject. In 1856 Mr. Bessemer, hav- 
 ing the full benefit of all this, conceived the happy 
 idea of blowing a stream of cold air into a mass of 
 molten iron, and the problem was solved. That in- 
 vention made him Sir Henry Bessemer, and gave 
 him an income of over 50,000 a year for twenty 
 years at least, and how much more I cannot say. 
 
 Now that a system which thus capriciously gives 
 or withholds rewards is in many ways most mischiev- 
 ous seems beyond dispute. That ninety-nine men 
 shall in return for useful inventions get nothing at 
 all, and that the hundredth shall get almost fabulous 
 wealth, gives to the business of invention much of 
 the feverish and unwholesome excitement of the
 
 152 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 lottery or the turf. But the question we are dis- 
 cussing is : Does this haphazard system develop and 
 ] stimulate inventive enterprise better than any other 
 that could be devised ? I say it doesn't. Supposing 
 that the gradual extension of State or Communal 
 enterprise really should be found to have the effect 
 of drying up the springs of invention, would it be 
 possible to devise any public scheme for setting them 
 flowing again ? I say that it would. We may not 
 hope to attain ideal justice in these matters, but that 
 it would be quite practicable to devise a system 
 which would afford a much nearer approximation to 
 ideal justice, and would do far more for the healthy 
 and steady development of new ideas than our present 
 barbarous scramble, I am convinced. 
 
 I have said that I do not intend to formulate any 
 precise system as likely to be that of the future. The 
 necessity for anything of the kind, in so far as it 
 arises from the advances of collective public enter- 
 prise, looks to be a long way off', and future social un- 
 foldings must do much in determining what may be 
 best. But by way of a rough suggestion and illustra- 
 tion, suppose that some such system as this were 
 adopted. A man makes an invention. He gets 
 testimonials from two County Councillors that, on the 
 face of it, it looks to be an idea that may be of public 
 service. He takes these testimonials to a sort of an 
 industrial grand jury, who turn the thing over and 
 hear what he has to say about it, and if they think 
 there is merit in it, will pass him on to a petty jury of 
 experts. These specialists may detect in it some weak 
 point that renders it quite useless. Or they may say,
 
 INVENTORS AND INVENTIONS. 153 
 
 " Yes ; a very good idea ; but it has been brought 
 out before. Turn to the register, number 10,700 on 
 page 16 of vol. 27, and you'll find full particulars. 
 You have undertaken your work without careful 
 inquiry, we can do nothing with it." In either case, 
 so far as the public is concerned, there is an end of 
 the matter, unless you choose to set up some sort of 
 court of appeal. But the petty jury may say, "Yes, 
 this looks to be a good thing. We take it to be a new 
 and valuable idea. We have sufficient evidence that 
 in one way and another you are fifty pounds out of 
 pocket by what you have done. We at once award 
 you that. But it is impossible to say at present what 
 may come of this. We register the invention and 
 throw it open to the community who will make what 
 use of it they think proper. Come before the court 
 again in six or twelve months' time and we shall then 
 be in a position to judge of the practical utility of the 
 thing, and will make you an award accordingly." 
 The thing proves really valuable to the public. There 
 is evidence that it has actually been made use of to 
 such and such an extent. " Yours is a meritorious 
 invention," say the jury. " You have done the public 
 good service and saved public money. We award you 
 a thousand pounds as a final discharge of all public 
 obligation to you." Or it may be that the new idea 
 is developing others and its influence is manifestly 
 spreading. " That being the case," say the jury, " we 
 award you the thousand pounds now, and you may 
 make another application to the court in a year's or 
 two years' time for further consideration of your 
 claims."
 
 154 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 Now, by some such system as this nobody might 
 have any chance of fabulous wealth, but every in- 
 ventor would have a fair chance of a reasonable 
 reward, while the public would have the full and un- 
 restricted benefit of every invention as soon as it was 
 made. You may, if you choose, institute a classifica- 
 tion of inventions. A new nutmeg grater may go 
 into class ten, and the maximum total award may be 
 fifty pounds. Sir Henry Bessemer's famous invention 
 which, undoubtedly, has exerted immense influence on 
 railway enterprise, and has revolutionised our iron 
 industry, might be adjudged to the first class with a 
 maximum of fifty thousand pounds, and the new rail- 
 way coupling, which does not pretend to add 
 materially to the wealth of the country, but merely 
 to save every year a few hundreds of our redundant 
 working-class fathers and husbands from being 
 crushed into pulp or chopped into fragments this 
 might go, say, into the fourth class with a possible ten 
 thousand pounds. Further than this, you may 
 arrange, if you please, that your jury shall be em- 
 powered to say, when occasion arises : " Here is a 
 man quite evidently endowed very highly with the 
 inventive faculty. Again and again he has been be- 
 fore us with novelties that have not exactly hit any 
 existing public demand, but which are characterised 
 by singular ingenuity and originality. Here is talent 
 of the highest and rarest order, though hitherto it has 
 not been of the money-making order. We cannot 
 award him money for the present public utility of 
 anything he has done, but it is quite conceivable that 
 in course of time one or two of the things he has in-
 
 INVENTORS AND INVENTIONS. 155 
 
 vented may prove invaluable, and in any case this 
 special faculty of his is well worth encouraging. We 
 recommend him for a first or second or third-class 
 inventorship. This will maintain him and will give 
 him access to public workshops and laboratories and 
 whatever other assistance he may require. The man 
 has genius ; in the public interest we will give him 
 free scope." Further still, you may, if you please, 
 institute two or three social orders of honour and 
 dignity to which men may aspire by repeatedly 
 becoming real benefactors of the community in the 
 way of invention and discovery, thus adding to a 
 reasonably well-grounded hope of substantial reward 
 a powerful appeal to honourable ambition. 
 
 I am not putting this forth as a practical proposal 
 for adoption ; it is merely a crude suggestion by way 
 of illustrating what I mean when I say that even 
 though public assumption of industrial and com- 
 mercial control should close the ordinary paths into 
 which the inventor has been wont to huny on to his 
 illusory fortune, it by no means follows that the 
 inventor need be altogether extinguished. On the 
 contrary, I maintain that by some such orderly, 
 reasonable method of dealing with inventions, and the 
 faculty which produces them, you may afford un- 
 bounded encouragement to the individual, while to 
 the community at large, you may ensure the perfectly 
 free and immediate use of every new idea that can in 
 any way contribute to the public welfare.
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 CONCLUSION. 
 
 FROM every point of view and in every righteous 
 interest, there is more to be said for order and system 
 and method, for peace and concord and harmonious 
 working, than there is for the strife and confusion of 
 a mere selfish scramble, and that is the conclusion of 
 the whole matter. And, after all, what is it but the 
 Christian conclusion ? 
 
 For nineteen centuries men have been preaching 
 peace, and praying for peace, and proclaiming the 
 Gospel of the Prince of Peace, and now that an era of 
 social and industrial concord really begins to slant its 
 first rosy beams over the hill-tops, many of them are 
 crying off in dismay. Peace if you please, but not 
 to this extreme. Put down competition indeed ! 
 Abolish industrial rivalry, bring all men into har- 
 monious and helpful relations with each other, and 
 how in the world are you going to get along? Where 
 is your motive power ? What will become of your 
 race of heroes, we used to be asked, if you put down 
 the clash of arms ? Men must fight or they will de- 
 generate into spiritless poltroons. And j ust in the same 
 way we are assured now that they must exert their 
 strength one against the other if they are to develop 
 characters with any muscle and sinew in them. It is 
 
 156
 
 CONCLUSION. 157 
 
 absolutely necessary that they shall wrestle in com- 
 petitive strife, and if you don't appeal to their 
 individual self-interest, how are you going to get 
 them to strive ? " Blessed are the peacemakers," we 
 remind them, and we point to the fact that the Bible 
 is full of splendid prophetic visions of a time of 
 universal peace even for this poor old world of ours 
 visions all untroubled by any fear of stagnation 
 and decay. And what the grand old seers of the 
 Bible saw far away in the distance, so clear and so 
 sweet, our own prophets, the modern poets, see 
 actually on the horizon, and they sigh for its speedy 
 advent. 
 
 ' ' Ah ! when shall all men's good 
 Be each man's rule, and universal peace 
 Lie like a shaft of light across the land 1 " 
 
 But then these prophecies and aspirations are not to 
 be taken too literally. Peace, as distinct from actual 
 war, let us have by all means, but, after all, you know 
 you really must allow a little play for the shelaleh. 
 After all there is a good deal to be said for 
 
 " The good old rule, the simple plan, 
 That he shall take who has the power 
 And he shall keep who can." 
 
 Only, of course, let the rule be applied with con- 
 science and moderation. 
 
 In urging these inconsistencies I am not suggesting 
 hypocrisy or insincerity. Far from it. The times 
 are perplexing and difficult, and it is not a serious 
 reproach to a man that he cannot readily take in all 
 the aspects of such problems as have lately been
 
 i $8 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 puzzling society. The truth is, that what Christian 
 people have been looking for and working for with 
 intense longing is actually coming about, but in a 
 totally unexpected way. Peace, brotherhood, har- 
 mony, mutual help, working for the common good 
 they have earnestly and honestly desired all these 
 things, and they have expected them to become 
 universal. But they have expected them entirely as 
 the result of supernatural influences, as distinct from 
 the social forces around them. Pentecostal showers, 
 mighty rushing winds of spiritual influence, great 
 religious revivals these are the things for which 
 they have been eagerly watching, and which have 
 hitherto been regarded as indispensable preliminaries 
 to universal peace and brotherhood. They simply 
 cannot realise the possibility that the providential 
 order of things, as they have understood it, may to a 
 certain extent be reversed, and that instead of the 
 spiritual well-being of the community being pre- 
 liminary to the well ordering of social affairs, the 
 proper organisation of social and industrial life may 
 be the means of promoting spiritual advance. Accus- 
 tomed as they have been to an unreal and unhealthy 
 distinction between the natural and the supernatural, 
 they cannot conceive that all the scientific and in- 
 dustrial forces of the times are as really and truly 
 working out providential designs as religious pro- 
 pagandism. They have been wont to sing 
 
 " God moves in a mysterious way 
 
 His wonders to perform, 
 He plants His footsteps in the sea 
 And rides upon the storm."
 
 CONCLUSION. 159 
 
 Yes; the sea and the storm, very likely. They are 
 old institutions, and perfectly orthodox. But that 
 God in His mysterious way should ride in a blaze of 
 electricity, and should lever up the world to higher 
 spiritual levels by mechanical invention that steam 
 power and the stress of economic forces, the pressure 
 of competition, the growth of joint-stock enterprise, 
 and the very greed and ambition of mercantile men 
 that God should use these modern and mundane 
 forces for the uplifting of the poor, the emancipation 
 of the oppressed, the calming down of strife, for pro- 
 moting concord, and unity, and mutual helpfulness 
 all this has been totally unexpected. The spiritual 
 regeneration of the world has hitherto been held to 
 be the indispensable preliminary to material and 
 social well-being. If there is any teaching in facts, we 
 are being taught that the very reverse of this may 
 be the case. In society, as in the individual human 
 life, the two things are, indeed, inseparably associated, 
 and that which men have been looking for as the 
 result of religious revivals, the mysterious rulership 
 of the world is forcing upon us by a necessity for 
 organisation which it is simply impossible for us either 
 to resist or to evade. 
 
 Peace, concord, mutual help, a closer union of effort. 
 It is the latest Divine message to a distracted world. 
 It is the latest revelation of Divine will, not this time 
 written in books, or sung by angelic voices from the 
 midnight skies, but plainly indicated by every pulse- 
 throb of the world around, and urged on our acceptance 
 by Almighty power. 
 
 Civilised society is entering on a new era, and it
 
 i6o THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 will be well for the Christian Churches to recognise 
 the fact. The few simple religious principles for 
 which it has ever been worth while seriously to con- 
 tend are precisely now what they ever have been. 
 They have neither changed nor developed. They are 
 steadfast as the everlasting hills. What has changed, 
 and is changing, is the condition of society to which 
 we are called upon to apply them, and it is j ust be- 
 cause the Christian Churches have failed as yet to 
 apprehend this fact in its full significance that so 
 many of them seem paralysed and impotent. When 
 society was simple and really individualistic when 
 it was composed of mere units, loosely held together, 
 you could deal with those units. The application of 
 your religion of brotherhood, and charity, was in a 
 sense simple and easy. As an individual you could 
 deal with an individual. But society is no longer 
 simple. It is highly organised and complex. Men 
 are massed in great bodies, made subject to great 
 economic laws that have been slowly gathering force 
 through long centuries. Human brotherhood is pre- 
 cisely what it always has been ; but if you want to 
 make that brotherhood effective for the help and up- 
 lifting of your fellow-men, you must totally alter your 
 methods. All around you find your brothers and your 
 sisters living under conditions of life which outrage 
 every sentiment of justice, every feeling of pity, every 
 benevolent instinct within you. You bitterly feel 
 the shame and the scandal of it all, and with a great 
 benevolence in your heart, and the precepts of the 
 New Testament on your lips, you pour out your money 
 by the million. And then comes the social economist
 
 CONCLUSION, 161 
 
 and sternly rebukes you. You may mean well, he 
 says, and in individual cases you may do good, but, 
 upon the whole, you are doing incalculable mischief. 
 You are working wholesale demoralisation among the 
 people, and, by the operation of the plainest of econo- 
 mic laws, your benevolent intentions are entirely 
 thwarted. In the long run, the more you give, the 
 lower will be the rate of wages. You restrict your 
 charity, and set yourself to find the people work. 
 And here again you may do some little good, but the 
 cynical onlooker smiles grimly upon you. It is true, 
 he says, you are finding work for these people, but 
 how are you doing it ? You give it to one man 
 simply by taking it from another. And you know 
 that you cannot deny it. Sick of your practically 
 useless struggle, you look round for some fresh open- 
 ing for these unemployed, and you find that the great 
 swelling tide of humanity has already surged up into 
 every nook and corner. There is not a square yard 
 of the industrial field unoccupied. Turn your bene- 
 volent enterprise what way you will, you find your- 
 self baffled and beaten. Your old methods may 
 have been right for the old times of simple social life, 
 but you are confronted by new phenomena, and 
 there you stand in impotent perplexity. It really 
 looks to you, perhaps, as though the world has out- 
 grown your principles. 
 
 It has done nothing of the kind. The Fatherhood 
 of God and the brotherhood of man are as real now 
 as they ever were. Your social obligations are greater 
 because your social ties are closer ; your active phil- 
 anthropy never was more needed because there never 
 
 L
 
 1 62 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 were such multitudes of men looking to you for help 
 and succour. But the simple truth is that your 
 philanthropy must take a bolder flight and a wider 
 range. Your individual benevolence may still avail 
 to mitigate individual suffering. But if you are to 
 deal with this problem effectively and finally, j r ou 
 must rise to the conception of an organised society in 
 which every man shall have his place and his work. 
 It is a conception that you cannot realise very rapidly, 
 but you must keep it steadily in view, and you must 
 advocate and support every measure that tends to it. 
 Set it before you, and push on towards it, and it will 
 kindle enthusiasm and sustain hope. It will give 
 you strength, and an infinitely peaceful assurance 
 not that you are working out the solution of this 
 problem, but that you are working in line and in 
 unison with the forces that are doing it. Push on in 
 this direction, and every step you take will make 
 your course plainer, and the ultimate issue more 
 manifestly certain. The people will sooner or later 
 catch your enthusiasm and will go with you. But 
 persist in the ridiculous attitude of those who believe 
 that it is more blessed and Christian to dole out 
 charities to your brother than charitably to put your 
 brother on a footing of independence, and you 
 and your doles will soon be laughed to scorn by all 
 that is manliest and worthiest among the poor them- 
 selves. " Not charity, but justice," is already their 
 watchword, and a closer and closer approximation to 
 justice they will assuredly have with every year that 
 rolls round. Their claims are righteous claims. They 
 are endorsed by infinite wisdom, and they are backed
 
 CONCLUSION. 163 
 
 by omnipotent power. We fuss, and fume, and coin 
 opprobrious names for each other, and wrangle over 
 our petty " laws " as though we were really regulating 
 affairs, but all the while the dread forces of social 
 life keep gathering head, and from time to time, 
 calmly but in overwhelming strength, they surge and 
 thunder along from point to point, putting anarchy to 
 rout, sweeping away injustice, confounding the forces 
 that make for strife and discord, and beating into 
 adamantine solidity the great human fabric. 
 
 And while all this is going on under our very eyes, 
 we, forsooth, will be " Individualists ! "
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 A CHAPTER WITH THE CRITICS. 
 
 THE first edition of this book has been extensively re- 
 viewed, and, with very few exceptions, the reviews have 
 been most gratifying. Not only have they embodied 
 some very kind and complimentary things, but they 
 have shown that, on all hands, there is a growing 
 sympathy with the principles for which the book 
 contends. 
 
 It is not, however, with the appreciative and lauda- 
 tory comments that this chapter will have to do, but 
 with a few of the more plausible and debatable ob- 
 jections that have been raised by some of those who 
 have done me the honour of noticing the book. 
 
 In one or two cases this honour has been a dubious 
 one. "A London journalist," says the Conservative 
 National Observer, " discusses want and wealth, the 
 classes and the masses, the small and large investor, 
 etc. The writer assures us he is not a Socialist ; one 
 doubts if even Socialists would be anxious to claim him. 
 He writes fluently, irrelevantly, without any grasp of 
 his theme, or any real comprehension of its difficulties. 
 He is a journalist." And with this lofty air of pene- 
 trative sagacity I am dismissed into the limbo of 
 cranks, and the reviewer passes on to the next culprit. 
 It is unfortunate for me that a gentleman of such a 
 
 164
 
 A CHAPTER WITH THE CRITICS. 165 
 
 grasp and comprehensiveness of intellect has not con- 
 descended to point out what the real difficulties are. 
 I would have sat at his feet in all humility and teach- 
 ableness. I feel sure, from the very keen and minutely 
 observant way in which he has read my preface, and 
 has found there a statement which, I venture to 
 affirm, nobody else will find, that he could have 
 thrown much light upon this difficult subject. 
 
 Another important paper the Glasgow Herald 
 is not much more flattering than the National Obser- 
 ver, though it deals with the book at greater length, 
 and is rather more explicit. "The feeling of the 
 book," says this critic, "is excellent, the optimism de- 
 lightful, and the muddleheadedness amazing." This 
 is really very cruel. Let any reader imagine if he 
 can the drop in the poor author's feelings of pride and 
 elation when he comes to that wretched third clause. 
 " Feeling excellent ; optimism delightful ; muddle- 
 headedness amazing ! " It is true that a little lower 
 down the reviewer says that there is a wholesome 
 freshness about the author's style which he finds very 
 attractive ; but what is that to a man who has just 
 been told that in attempting to deal with an intricate 
 and difficult social subject he has shown himself 
 amazingly muddleheaded ? I am afraid that " de- 
 lightful optimism " of mine has not helped me with 
 the reviewer at all. If you want to get credit for 
 shrewdness of observation and clear-headedness of 
 thinking, never be optimistic in your views of life 
 and the world about you. Depend upon it, Pro- 
 vidence is pretty sure to be making a mess of things, 
 and it is wiser and safer to assume that the world is
 
 166 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 going to the bad, and that all the great ideals and 
 glowing hopes that sometimes shed a little glow of 
 warmth and light over this doghole of a world of 
 ours are mere illusions that can deceive nobody of any 
 penetration and clearness of vision. 
 
 But what is the muddleheadedness of which the 
 Glasgow Herald impeaches me ? The only illustration 
 of it to which I can find any allusion in the notice of 
 the book is in connection with the subject of capital. 
 " The author's view of the absorption of industrial 
 enterprise by the State is very confused. Sometimes 
 he speaks of this being accomplished with the aid of 
 capital and sometimes of its being accomplished with- 
 out." I certainly have nowhere said anything so 
 stupid as that any industrial enterprise can be carried 
 on without capital. No doubt the reviewer means 
 borrowed capital. 
 
 Now, it seems to me quite clear that in this matter, 
 a community may do just as an individual may. A 
 tradesman who is doing a profitable business, and who 
 wishes to extend that business, may wait until he has 
 saved up sufficient capital ; or, if circumstances render 
 it undesirable to wait, and he is able to take up 
 money, he may think it expedient to borrow and 
 begin at once. Surely a community may do the same. 
 It is a matter of mere detail to be decided by circum- 
 stances, and I really cannot see that there is any 
 muddleheadedness in assuming that sometimes it 
 might be best to borrow capital and sometimes best 
 to do without borrowing. The reviewer also refuses 
 to believe that the tendency of the time is to circum- 
 scribe and gradually abolish the opportunities for the
 
 A CHAPTER WITH THE CRITICS. 167 
 
 investment of money. " It is clear," he says, " that, 
 leaving confiscation out of the reckoning, transference 
 to the nation or the municipality of an industry or a 
 public service means simply the fixation of interest 
 for the money invested in these, not at all the aboli- 
 tion of investment, as our author argues." 
 
 Is that really clear to you, Mr. Reviewer ? Then 
 supposing the Post Office should presently wish to 
 buy out the existing parcel companies and to assume 
 entire monopoly, they must of necessity borrow the 
 money to do it, and go on paying interest for it for 
 all time. Why must they necessarily do this when 
 their present business already yields them a profit of 
 over three millions a year ? Why cannot they do 
 like a prudent tradesman save up their profits for a 
 few years, and extend their business with their own 
 capital ? I shall be told, perhaps, that it would come 
 to the same thing, since the interest on capital and 
 the profits on business would all come out of the 
 public pocket. Very well, if the two things are the 
 same, why should the reviewer assume that, as a 
 matter of course, the public would prefer to borrow 
 capital and pay interest ? He gives no reason, and I 
 venture to think he will find it hard to discover any, 
 unless he finds one in the desire of the public to afford 
 opportunities for people to live by investment. But 
 if he knows anything of the drift of public opinion 
 on this point, he knows that it is running strongly in 
 the very opposite direction, and that all over Europe 
 advanced thinkers and radical reformers are not only 
 predicting the end of the capitalist regime, but are 
 strenuously working to bring it about.
 
 1 68 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 This same point of objection was urged in the 
 columns of the Christian World, which devoted a 
 very able leading article to a discussion of this book, 
 and gave expression to some very out-spoken opinions 
 upon the subject generally : 
 
 "It is certainly a remarkable sign of the times," 
 says the Christian World of the 1st September, 1892, 
 " that thinkers in all parts of the civilised world, 
 observing the drift of things around them, are arriv- 
 ing with more or less unanimity at conclusions of this 
 character. There is no question that society is mov- 
 ing, with ever-accelerating pace, from individualism 
 pure and simple towards some form of collectivism. 
 Men are feeling after a system which shall insure to 
 all humanity, the weak as well as the strong, a share 
 in the general progress. The state of things which 
 secures to the few contentment, luxury, and scope for 
 full development, while leaving the mass very much 
 in the state of the slaves in the old Greek system, 
 must give way to one in which well-being and the 
 possibilities of culture shall be a common heritage. A 
 sentiment is growing which will one day make it 
 impossible for good men to enjoy while others simply 
 endure. The condition of this enjoyment will be that 
 others share in it. 
 
 " Going so far with our author," continues the 
 article, " we are, nevertheless, not able to accept all 
 his conclusions. We do not, for instance, see that the 
 facts and tendencies which he describes point inevit- 
 ably to the extinction of capitalists, for, in the first 
 place, his system leaves room for the accumulation of
 
 A CHAPTER WITH THE CRITICS. 169 
 
 private capital. Under it men will earn incomes, and 
 some of them very large ones. That means capital 
 which would be on the look-out for employment. 
 And, in the second place, it does not in the least follow 
 that the public control of great business systems 
 would exclude the investment of private and interest- 
 bearing capital in them. In proof of this we cannot 
 do better than cite the Bergen method of dealing with 
 the drink traffic. In that flourishing Norwegian sea- 
 port the drink trade is in the hands of the civic 
 authorities, who lease it to a private company, reg- 
 ulating the action of that company at all points, 
 with a view to the public well-being, but allowing 
 them to take a profit of five per cent, on the capital 
 they have invested. Here all the conditions of what 
 it is declared will be the ultimate evolution of trade 
 and commerce are present. The private traders have 
 been absorbed into one great monopoly, and that 
 monopoly is under State control. But the system has 
 not extinguished the capitalist." 
 
 In reply to this criticism, I addressed a letter to the 
 editor, and he was courteous enough to insert it the 
 following week. With regard to the question of 
 capital, I dealt pretty much as I have done now. 
 " And as it is with capital," the letter proceeded, 
 "so it is with management " : 
 
 " A private tradesman may take over a business, 
 and either manage it himself, or he may do as the 
 Bergen people have done retain proprietorship and 
 general control, but hand over the practical working
 
 i;o THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 of it to a manager, who will bring in capital and take 
 a definite share of the profits as his remuneration. 
 At the present time, and under existing circumstances, 
 the Bergen people very possibly are wiser to adopt 
 this intermediate system, and not at present to 
 push on to a complete and final collectivist de- 
 velopment. So long as the capitalist company can 
 serve any public purpose better than the public can 
 serve themselves, why, it would be folly to object to 
 them. But judging by all one sees going on around, 
 sooner or later the time will come when present ar- 
 rangements will no longer be considered satisfactory. 
 The public of Bergen will go on gaining experience in 
 managing their own affairs. Five per cent, may now 
 be a very reasonable return for investment. But, like 
 all other traders, capitalists will find competition be- 
 come keener and keener ; and sooner or later five per 
 cent, will be considered very high. Bergen will begin 
 to ask itself why it should go on paying year after 
 year 50,000, or whatever five per cent, may come to, 
 for the use of capital that it can do perfectly well 
 without. What the Bergen people have done as re- 
 gards their beer we here in London have long done in 
 
 o ri 
 
 the matter of our water. Practically it has been the 
 same thing. We have granted a monopoly, we have 
 exercised a control, and we have limited dividends. 
 For very many years we were fairly well satisfied ; 
 but the profits which were once thought only reason- 
 able, we are now beginning to perceive are exorbitant. 
 The service is by no means all that we can desire, and 
 we are about to take it into our own hands. We 
 shall want capital to do it with, and in all probability
 
 A CHAPTER WITH THE CRITICS. 171 
 
 a good many of the water company capitalists will 
 lend us money, but at nothing like the return they 
 have been getting hitherto. For a time, no doubt, this 
 public control of our water supply will, as you say, be 
 quite compatible with the continued usefulness of the 
 capitalist. But that is not the final issue. As London 
 becomes increasingly prosperous and her government 
 increasingly efficient, she will accumulate wealth, and, 
 of course, she will pay off what she owes, just as a 
 prudent and prosperous individual would do. 
 
 " But all that is a good way ahead Depend upon 
 it we need not trouble ourselves about the ultimate 
 fate of the investing capitalist. That he is doomed to 
 eventual extinction there is not a doubt, but it will 
 be a very long and gradual process. He will be let 
 down very gently, and probably to the very last he 
 will be conscious of no greater hardship, or difficulty, 
 or injustice than he is apt to complain of at the pre- 
 sent time. Before this change can come about, the 
 whole fabric of society must have been reconstructed, 
 and the opportunities of living upon investments will 
 not disappear till they have been replaced by other 
 opportunities of a far healthier character. We need 
 not trouble about the coming extinction of the in- 
 vestor, except in so far as to assure ourselves that it 
 may be in due time not only a necessary but a right 
 and desirable outcome of the movements of our own 
 day. What we have to do is to put ourselves in line 
 with those movements, and, strong in our trust that 
 the Power behind them is wise and beneficent, to 
 push boldly onward."
 
 172 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 A question which several reviewers have raised, as 
 one that presents formidable difficulties in the way 
 of progress, is the question of population. The 
 Westminster Review, in a most flattering notice of 
 the book, alludes to this. " It is not for us," remarks 
 the Westminster, " to pick holes in a project that we 
 have so much at heart .... yet he does not grapple 
 with our old bugbear increase of population ; he 
 does not show us how we shall stay that advance 
 with one hand, while we lift up the fallen with the 
 other." 
 
 I would fain believe, as the Westminster Review is 
 kind enough to say, that "that is, perhaps, the only blot 
 on the book." I did not attempt to deal with the 
 question of population, because, in the first place, it is 
 in itself rather a large subject, and in the next place, 
 the necessity for dealing with it really did not occur 
 to me. Quite early in the book I had distinctly 
 mentioned the increase of population as one of the 
 causes of the tendency to big businesses, centralised 
 organisation, and public control. This, I had said, 
 " is a dominant, overmastering, irresistible tendency 
 of the times, due, in a great measure, at least, to the 
 increase of population, and to the steady march of 
 mechanical invention." It did not occur to me to 
 suppose that anyone would argue that because our 
 people are becoming more and more numerous, there- 
 fore it is not advisable to try and organise them. 
 The whole of my book, from beginning to end, was a 
 plea for order, for system, for organisation. It 
 seemed to me too obvious to be worth while pointing 
 out that the larger becomes the population, the more
 
 A CHAPTER WITH THE CRITICS. 173 
 
 imperatively necessary that order, that system, that 
 organisation must become. With a couple of hands 
 employed in your business, your method of managing 
 and directing need be nothing very elaborate. Two 
 dozen will require some little system in dealing with 
 them. It' you have two thousand, your organisation 
 of their activity will have to be very skilful, and 
 minute, and precise, while a body of two hundred 
 thousand men could not be managed at all except by 
 organising talent of the highest order. All this 
 seems self-evident, and yet, several reviewers twit 
 me with having shirked the population question be- 
 cause it presents a serious objection to collect! vist 
 theories. " This growth of population," says one of 
 them, " is no bogus objection, but a very real one." 
 So far from being an objection, the constant and 
 rapid increase of our numbers, is to my mind one of 
 the strongest of all possible reasons why we should 
 hurry on in our endeavours to reduce the swelling 
 throng to order and harmony. If they are to be left 
 to a wild competitive scramble, the larger the throng, 
 the fiercer and the more brutal the strife will be- 
 come. The thing is too clear to need elucidation. 
 
 It may be, however, that this does not quite 
 represent the objection that was in the mind of the 
 Westminster reviewer, when he complains that " he 
 doesn't show us how we shall stay that advance with 
 one hand, while we lift up the fallen with the other." 
 The difficulty which presents itself to many minds, 
 may, I imagine, be stated in some such form as this : 
 " Even with all the poverty that is in our midst, and 
 with all the checks which that poverty affords, our
 
 i?4 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 population increases enormously. If you remove that 
 poverty, the increase will be still greater. Even now 
 we are over-populated ; what would be the case, if by 
 any social change the great mass of our toiling and 
 starving poor were lifted to a level of comfort and 
 plenty ? " 
 
 Within the space at my disposal, I cannot deal with 
 that difficulty at any great length. But I may just 
 indicate the lines upon which I would argue in some 
 detail if I had the space. 
 
 In the first place, it appears to me that it has been 
 demonstrated over and over again to be a ridiculous 
 fallacy, to suppose that we are over-populated. There 
 is an appearance of over-population, no doubt, but it 
 is only an appearance, and it is attributable entirely 
 to the unorganised and chaotic condition of our labour- 
 market, the pernicious influence of a worn-out land 
 system, and the out- working of a competitive order 
 of things which is fast advancing to its own ex- 
 tinction. Our population is already so large, that in 
 our condition of rabblement and confusion it is em- 
 barrassing, and it is increasing with a rapidity which 
 will compel us to put our house in order if nothing 
 else were forcing us to do so. But we are not within 
 a thousand years of anything like serious over- 
 population, and the more rapidly we evolve order 
 out of chaos, the further into the future will the day 
 of over-population recede. This, I believe to be as 
 demonstrable as a proposition in euclid. 
 
 If. therefore, it were true, that to render the great 
 mass of our population comfortable and thriving, 
 would be to give an enormous impulse to the increase
 
 A CHAPTER WITH THE CRITICS. 175 
 
 of numbers, there would be nothing to fear, provided 
 that this increase of comfort and prosperity were 
 the result of greater social order and higher social 
 mechanism. 
 
 But it is not true. No doubt if you were to take 
 the entire labouring population of this kingdom, and 
 bring them by a single step into a condition of ease 
 and comfort and abundance, the increase of your 
 numbers would soon become something appalling. 
 It is the way of mere animal life all creation over. 
 But nobody proposes to do anything of the kind, and 
 if it were proposed, it would manifestly be quite im- 
 possible to effect it. Throughout this book I have 
 assumed, and so far as I have observed all rational 
 Socialists assume, that any great organic change in 
 society will be comparatively slow in its advance, and 
 that it will bring with it not merely an increase in 
 beef and pudding, but also a vast expansion of all the 
 means by which men are enabled and impelled to ad- 
 vance out of the animal into the mental and the moral 
 and the spiritual. The minute you begin to evolve in 
 this direction, you bring into play forces that are 
 antagonistic to that reckless increase of which you 
 stand in dread. Nothing can be more illogical and 
 inconsistent than the attitude of many people with 
 regard to this matter. They will tell you that it is 
 the denizens of our slums, the ignorant and degraded 
 labouring classes, who marry earliest, and have the larg- 
 est families. And if you advocate any social changes 
 likely to lift these classes out of the slums, and make 
 respectable and self-respecting citizens of them, these 
 same good people will oppose you on the ground that
 
 176 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 if you do that you will bring about such an increase 
 of population as will quite indefinitely complicate all 
 your social difficulties. Yet one would think that the 
 teaching of experience and the most superficial obser- 
 vation of the world around them would be sufficient 
 to reassure them. Here you have three classes the 
 upper ten, the middle thousand, the lower million. 
 Broadly speaking, the thousand and ten have never 
 known hunger or want, or serious discomfort or diffi- 
 culty. Is it they who increase and multiply so alarm- 
 ingly ? No. It is the million doomed to hardship 
 and hunger and to general conditions of life tending 
 to degrade and brutalise them. It is reasonable to 
 infer that if by your social changes you can gradually 
 do away with these debasing conditions, and lift the 
 million to something of the moral and material status 
 of the thousand, you will not increase the tendency to 
 multiply, but rather diminish it. I am well aware 
 that it is a fact based on the most trustworthy statis- 
 tics that with an advance in general prosperity the 
 marriage rate rises, and that in times of depression 
 and difficulty it falls. But that does not militate 
 against my argument at all. I do not say that, all 
 other things being equal, prosperity and abundance 
 are not more conducive to increase of population than 
 adversity and want. Certainly not. But I do say 
 that if you take a mass of people with little edu- 
 cation, with very narrow interests, with an extremely 
 low standard of domestic comfort and merely animal 
 tastes and pleasures, and little by little advance them 
 all along the line, physically, mentally, morally, 
 socially, you may indeed promote a tendency to rapid
 
 A CHAPTER. WITH THE CRITICS. 177 
 
 multiplication, but at the same time you bring into 
 play forces which in the long run effectually check and 
 counteract it. And I maintain that this is the teach- 
 ing of all experience of the upper and middle strata of 
 society everywhere. 
 
 My answer, then, to this objection, based on the 
 danger of over-population, is that, in the first place, 
 we are not in danger of over-population ; and, in the 
 next place, if we were, the most effectual safeguard 
 against it would be to raise the standard of comfort, 
 of respectability, and general intelligence in the 
 largest, the lowest, and the most recklessly prolific 
 section of the people. 
 
 The most lengthy and elaborate notice of this book 
 that has come under my observation is in the current 
 number of the London Quarterly Review. " An 
 article on ' The Social Horizon,' " says Mr. Stead in 
 the Review of Reviews in noticing the contents of the 
 London Quarterly, " deals in a gingerly, supercilious 
 fashion with the author of the ' Life in Our Villages ' 
 series of letters in the Daily News." It does. The 
 fashion is very gingerly and supercilious indeed. I 
 have chosen to issue this book anonymously. The 
 reviewer, with great delicacy of taste, dubs me Mr. 
 Smith, and says that, " The chief interest of this 
 little book lies in the fact that it contains the mus- 
 ings of a man in the street," Mr. Smith, you see, the 
 man in the street, under the scrutiny of the Honour- 
 able Superphyne Fitznoodle, in his well-appointed 
 library. This modest assumption of vast superiority 
 gives the critic a good start, and enables him to 
 sneer with great effect fn in beginning to end of his
 
 178 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 article. His object, he explains, " is to chronicle the 
 observations and reflections of the average man upon 
 the social movements of the time, rather than " to 
 repeat the wise and weighty utterances which, we 
 are assured, have so frequently appeared in the 
 Review on the subject of Socialism. 
 
 Now, I have not the least objection to the good old 
 English name of Smith, and it is perfectly true that 
 if I have any qualifications at all for dealing with a 
 subject of this kind, it is because I have been in a very 
 real sense a man in the street out and about amongst 
 all sorts of people, as distinct from those superior 
 intelligences who do all their study of social subjects 
 from the depths of an easy-chair, and who never go 
 east of Temple Bar. Nevertheless, this supercilious 
 swagger is very rude and discourteous. I could have 
 submitted uncomplainingly to it, however, if the 
 great man had only bestowed upon me a few crumbs 
 of that wisdom with which he is so bountifully en- 
 dowed. But his is another of those piercing intellects 
 that can so clearly discern all the difficulties and 
 perplexities by which the social problem is beset, but 
 do not help us a bit in our endeavours to find any 
 way out of them. "The solving of the social riddle," 
 he says, " is not quite so simple a matter as our street 
 philosophers suppose. At our side there lie a dozen 
 volumes, each containing a valuable specific for the 
 evils of our social life. Not one of all their authors 
 seems to have the least conception of the infinite 
 complexity of our social relations, or the faintest fear 
 of evils greater or more widely-spreading, which, if 
 history teaches anything, would be quite certain to
 
 A CHAPTER WITH THE CRITICS. 179 
 
 arise were we but ' sensible ' enough to try the 
 remedies proposed. But let us keep to Mr. Smith." 
 He, accordingly, proceeds to examine the chapter in 
 which I have attempted to illustrate the principles I 
 advocate by supposing them applied to the vehicles of 
 London. 
 
 I cannot minutely follow the learned Mr. Fitz- 
 noodle throughout his dissertations on the subject. 
 He sneers and gibes and tries to make it appear that I 
 am incapable of understanding that public rates come 
 out of people's pockets. " In the arcana of the new 
 metaphysics," he grandly says, " a very wonderful 
 distinction has been discovered between 'the rates' 
 and the pockets of the ratepayers." Alas ! I under- 
 stand this branch of the subject only too well. He 
 makes particularly merry over my contention that, 
 for every ten thousand men you can take out of the 
 ranks of the unemployed, and bring into useful and 
 fairly paid work, you set a new life current tingling 
 through every vein of the community. I have actually 
 been ridiculous enough to suggest that the 'busmen 
 and cabmen and trainmen of London might be put 
 into comfortable uniforms like policemen and post- 
 men, and that some of the poor struggling and starv- 
 ing seamstresses of the East -End might be employed 
 under comfortable conditions and fairly paid to make 
 these uniforms. Mr. Fitznoodle is very droll over it 
 all. The next thing would be that the seamstresses 
 themselves would be wanting comfortable uniforms, 
 or rather multiforms according to their tastes and 
 needs, and further, model factories would be needed. 
 Really a most appalling possibility ! " And then we
 
 180 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 should go on to agitate for country cottages for these 
 same seamstresses, and free accommodation in the 
 omnibuses to and from their work." Truly a fright- 
 ful development ! Positively comfortable cottages, 
 either in town or country, for hard-working public 
 servants ! " And if seamstresses, why should not 
 every other class of workers be provided for in similar 
 suitable and pleasurable ways ? " Why, indeed, Mr. 
 Fitznoodle, as fast as it can be brought about ? 
 "But," objects the reviewer, with a fine coruscation 
 of wit, " the swollen veins of the community might 
 burst ? They might. What then would happen we 
 are hardly competent to say." 
 
 Very incompetent, I should say. And this is the 
 poor stuff which practical people are expected to ac- 
 cept as arguments against movements which they 
 believe to be fraught with incalculable benefits to 
 millions of people. After all the obfuscations of our 
 arm-chair philosopher, what does the matter amount 
 to ? Merely to this : Londoners require a service of 
 public vehicles. I say that the men engaged in it 
 should be paid fairly well, and should have reasonable 
 hours, and that Londoners are quite able to pay what- 
 ever it may cost, either directly in fares, or indirectly 
 by a general rate. My facetious critic brings all the 
 resources of his wit and wisdom to prove that if any- 
 thing so wildly extravagant should be attempted, the 
 heavens would fall, the very pillars of the social fabric 
 would totter, or, at the very least, the public would 
 soon be rushing headlong into bankruptcy. On that 
 point, at least, I am quite content to leave the issue 
 to " street philosophers."
 
 A CHAPTER WITH THE CRITICS. 181 
 
 There is one point in this review which may be 
 worth considering for a moment. A passage is quoted 
 in which I have endeavoured to show the ever-in- 
 creasing tendency to larger schemes and higher organi- 
 sation, and this at a time when we are only on the 
 threshold of the age of electricity. " What the effect 
 of the new motor will be, no one can foresee," says 
 the reviewer. " For anything Mr. Smith can tell, 
 when force can be stored up and subdivided and 
 transmitted by electricity, the tendency may be re- 
 versed or greatly modified. A process of decentrali- 
 zation may set in, a:.d many manufactures may once 
 more be carried on within the little workshop or the 
 home. The villages may become again the scenes of 
 busy industry, and the population be more evenly 
 distributed throughout the land." 
 
 That is very well put. I remember hearing, many 
 years ago, the late Rev. Baldwin Brown preach a very 
 eloquent and impressive sermon on the electric power 
 as a new manifestation of Providence, destined per- 
 haps to banish many of the evils of the age of steam. 
 He dwelt very forcibly, I thought at the time, with 
 that very possibility of decentralization and redistri- 
 bution of the people. Since then, from time to time, 
 I have followed up that idea ; but if I were to put 
 some of rny thoughts here into print, I should only 
 raise a superior smile on the visage of my scarifier, 
 and give him further occasion to sneer at my well- 
 meant enthusiasm. I will content myself with merely 
 suggesting one or two points for the reviewer's con- 
 sideration. 
 
 In the first place, such a reconstruction as that
 
 182 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 which he hints at as possible would necessarily in- 
 volve enormous central works for the generation of 
 electricity, and these, it could hardly be disputed, 
 would be most advantageously and most economically 
 established by government. In the next place, there 
 would have to be an almost inconceivably extensive 
 and intricate system of electric trunk and branch 
 lines ramifying into every part of the country. This 
 also would certainly have to be under centralized 
 control. Then again, such a manufacturing system 
 could hardly be carried on without a great expansion 
 of our telegraph and postal services, while, for the 
 transmission of raw material and the return of manu- 
 factured goods, we could not very well do without a 
 large expansion of our carrying facilities, and a very 
 strict and elaborate system of governmental super- 
 vision of such facilities, even if it did not become 
 necessary for the public to assume entire control. 
 And once more, supposing your great factories have 
 been broken up, and small ones dotted about all over 
 the land, and manufactured goods were coming up to 
 our great populous centres from small workshops and 
 cottage homes in every remote corner of the kingdom, 
 how would you stand with regard to the dissemina- 
 tion of infectious diseases without an enormous ex- 
 pansion of public sanitary inspection and control ? 
 
 Now I venture to affirm that every one of those 
 considerations points unmistakably to a further 
 approximation to a great organic industrial whole, 
 and that any writer who brings forward such a sug- 
 gestion as this, as an argument in favour of the sup- 
 position that the coming age of electricity may after
 
 A CHAPTER WITH THE CRITICS. 183 
 
 all lead us back to extreme individualism, cannot 
 have given five minutes' coherent thought to the 
 subject. 
 
 There are two good passages in this article of the 
 London Quarterly reviewer, and, I think, only two. 
 One is a very admirable quotation from Dr. Dale, 
 with which he finally crushes me, and the other is 
 the opening paragraph, in which he frankly and un- 
 reservedly admits that the drift of things is really 
 pretty much as I have represented it. Within his 
 own recollection, something approaching to a revolu- 
 tion in the public mind has taken place upon this 
 subject. He says explicitly that, " the only vital 
 and effective force is that which is urging both'the 
 great political parties in the direction of socialistic 
 experiment in legislation, and of a considerable ex- 
 tension of local and central governmental control. 
 Not many years ago, the Manchester School was pre- 
 dominant, and Laissez faire the only doctrine heard." 
 And now, " in this country public sentiment, if not 
 c mipletely changed, is changing fast in almost all 
 departments of our social life." 
 
 It is really very remarkable, considering that for 
 forty years, as we are told, the London Quarterly 
 reviewer has been arguing against it. There is, how- 
 ever, no shutting his eyes to the fact that the men 
 in the street seem to be getting the best of it, but for 
 the life of him he cannot understand it. He appears 
 to be looking down upon it all very much as an 
 anxious hen looks upon the young duckling of her 
 brood when the extraordinary little creature first takes 
 to the water. " In this way," he bemoans, " free-born
 
 1 84 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 Englishmen seem inclined to enslave themselves." 
 But it cannot really be that all those weighty argu- 
 ments on the other side can have been entirely thrown 
 away; sooner or later they must have their effect. 
 " That there will be a tremendous reaction when the 
 people once begin to feel the yoke, we do not doubt." 
 A reaction against what ? " That the fetters are 
 forged and fastened by the people who wear them 
 will not make them less oppressive or galling." What 
 fetters ? Are there no fetters now ? Is this really a 
 world of perfect freedom ? Is there none of the 
 galling of oppression ? Is the postmaster-general 
 really so brutally tyrannical and oppressive as com- 
 pared with other employers in the city ? Does this 
 reviewer really wish to persuade us that when the 
 London County Council shall have acquired the few 
 miles of tramway they are preparing to take over, 
 their employe's, after a short experience of the 
 slavery to which they will be doomed, will rise in a 
 " tremendous reaction " and insist upon being restored 
 to the mild and beneficent rule of the private 
 companies ? 
 
 Let me tell a little story that I am not sure I have 
 not told in print before. When I first came to 
 London, a good many years ago, I went with a friend 
 to a respectable shop in a middle-class neighbourhood 
 of the West End to get my hair cut. Having been 
 led there once, I continued to go year after year, until 
 little by little the respectable shop became so shabby 
 and mean-looking that I was rather ashamed to go 
 into it. But the man was always very civil and 
 attentive, and I did not like to leave him because he
 
 A CHAPTER WITH THE CRITICS. 185 
 
 seemed to be going down in the world, and I kept up 
 my regular visits. 
 
 " How long is it since I first came to your shop, 
 Mr. So-and-So ? " I asked him one day, as he clipped 
 away at my hair. " Oh, it must be nearly twenty 
 years, sir," he said. " Yes, I think it must. And do 
 you know, I have been thinking that during the 
 whole of that time I have come here on every day in 
 the week except Sunday, and at almost all hours of 
 the day, and I cannot call to mind a single occasion 
 when I have not found you here ready to attend to 
 me. Are you always here ? " "Yes, sir, always here. 
 ' Keep your shop, you know, sir, and your shop'll keep 
 you.' " It was with rather a sickly smile he said it, 
 poor man. "What time do you open in the morn- 
 ing ? " " Oh, about half-past eight." "And you close 
 at night ?" "About nine, except Saturdays, and then 
 it's twelve." " Dear me ! what slavery ! And do all 
 the hairdressers about here keep these hours ? " 
 " Oh, yes, sir ; all obliged to do it." " Well, but how 
 absurd of you. Why don't you put your heads to- 
 gether and corne to an understanding for shorter 
 hours. If you all did it you would do just as much 
 business." " Oh," said the free-born Englishman, 
 drawing himself up with an air of great independence, 
 " I shouldn't agree to that, sir ; I shouldn't allow any- 
 body to dictate to me what time I should open and 
 close my shop. I don't agree with movements of 
 that sort. It seems to me an interference with the 
 liberty of the subject." 
 
 I think I went twice more after that memorable 
 declaration of independence, but the second time the
 
 186 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 shutters were up ; my hairdresser had gone and left 
 no address. He had probably migrated to some 
 frowsier neighbourhood, where, in addition to his six 
 days of unfettered freedom, he would, no doubt, find 
 the further liberty to open his shop and do a little 
 easy shaving of chins at a penny apiece on a Sunday 
 morning. 
 
 Now there, you have the kind of freedom which the 
 London Quarterly reviewer and a great many others 
 of our teachers, equally sapient and observant, are 
 dreadfully afraid that Englishmen seem inclined to 
 part with. And they would fain persuade you, that 
 if you were to exchange that system of little com- 
 petitive shopkeeping for another system by which 
 the public could be served and tradesmen could get 
 a living, and yet have time and ease of heart to 
 enjoy a country stroll on a summer evening, or to 
 attend a lecture or a concert, or a theatre or a picture 
 gallery, or a sermon, or a museum any day they 
 pleased they would fain persuade you that no sooner 
 should free-born Englishmen discover the real slavery 
 of that kind of thing than there would be " a tremen- 
 dous reaction," and everybody would insist upon 
 getting back with all speed to that faultless system of 
 business so strikingly illustrated in the career and 
 collapse of my hairdresser. 
 
 I have referred to an admirable passage which the 
 reviewer has quoted from Dr. Dale. Let us repro- 
 duce it. 
 
 " I do not believe," says Dr. Dale, " in large 
 schemes for changing the whole order either of our 
 political or economic life. If I am asked to accept a
 
 A CHAPTER WITH THE CRITICS. 187 
 
 scheme, and to work for it, which would transfer all 
 the materials and instruments of production to the 
 State, and am assured that only by such a revolu- 
 tionary method as this can the miseries of consider- 
 able masses of the people be removed, I am obliged 
 to reply that the conditions which determine the 
 economical prosperity of nations are so complex, that 
 I have not the confidence and the courage to deter- 
 mine whether such an immense reconstruction would, 
 on the whole, be beneficial ; that the equation con- 
 tains so many unknown quantities, that I cannot 
 solve it; that the greatest and most beneficent 
 improvements in the social and economic condition 
 of nations have not hitherto been the working out of 
 a complete and systematic theory of the true, social, 
 and economic order; that, judging from experience, 
 the destruction of our present organisation and the 
 attempt to reconstruct our economic life on the 
 principles of collectivism, would not work as its 
 promoters anticipate ; and that very possibly the evil 
 results would greatly outweigh the good. And if I 
 am told that the Christian faith is irrevocably 
 pledged to the cause of justice and mercy, and that, 
 while the social order is unjust and unmerciful, 
 Christian men are unfaithful to Christ if they do not 
 attempt to reform it, I answer, ' Yes ; ' but I must 
 first be sure that the new order would be more just 
 and merciful than the old, and that the methods pro- 
 posed for abolishing the old order, would, at the same 
 time, provide for the secure establishment of the new. 
 And, further, the first object of the Christian faith is 
 not to secure justice and mercy in social institu-
 
 i88 THE SOCIAL HORIZON. 
 
 tions, but to make Christian men merciful and 
 just." 
 
 A wise and weighty utterance. But what have I to 
 do with it ? How does it apply to me or my book ? 
 Let me quote myself from page 97. "We must go 
 warily. It must be a growth and not a revolution, 
 and all that I am contending for is, that instead of 
 regarding the public control of the industries of the 
 people as something to be dreaded, and avoided, and 
 obstructed, we should really look upon it as a goal to 
 which we should push on with all possible speed, con- 
 sistent with safety and prudence." The book pro- 
 pounds no scheme of mine. I have merely set forth 
 in plain and popular language, a series of perfectly 
 indisputable facts which many abler men than myself 
 have dealt with scientifically, and I have used those 
 facts to show that the power behind all our social 
 phenomena is now, and has been throughout our 
 history, working along certain lines of development, 
 and I have endeavoured to show some reasons for 
 believing that along those lines, and only along those 
 lines, will be found the happiness and prosperity of 
 the people. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 Printed by Cowan & Co., Limited, Perth.
 
 SECOND EDITION, THOROUGHLY REVISED AND EXTENDED TO ABOUT 
 40,000 BOOKS. 
 
 iioo//. Thick 4/0, cloth extra, -$\s. 6d. nett. 
 With very Copious Topical and Author's Indexes. 
 
 THE BEST BOOKS 
 
 A Reader's Guide to the Choice of the Best Available Books in all 
 Departments of Literature down to 1890, with the Dates of the 
 First and Last Editions, and the Price, Size, and Publisher's 
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 The whole work is divided into CLASSES, each of which is sub-divided into 
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 and lucidly arranged. contains 
 
 CLASS A. THEOLOGY [(a) NATURAL (b) ETHNIC (c) CHRISTIAN] 134 sects. 
 
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 CLASS E. GEOGRAPHY, TRAVEL, and ETHNOGRAPHY . . 69 
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 CLASS K. LITERATURE and PHILOLOGY 286 
 
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 Translated from the Third German Edition by SAMUEL MOORE and 
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 Fourth English Edition, I vol., 8vo. 
 
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 By the late Professor J. E. THOROLD ROGERS. 
 
 Third Edition, i vol. 
 
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 Social and Political Catalogue. 
 
 4 English Associations of Working Men : 
 
 By J. M. BAERNREITHER, Doctor of Law, Member of the House of 
 
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 TAYLOR. With a Preface by J. M. LUDLOW, Chief Registrar of 
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 instruction than any other in the world's history." Daily Telegraph. 
 
 48. The Destitute Alien in Great Britain. ARNOLD WHITE ; MONTAGUE CBACKAN- 
 
 THORPE, Q.C. ; W. A. M'ARTHUR, M.P. ; W. H. WILKINS, &o. 
 " Much valuable information concerning a burning question of the day." Times. 
 
 49. Illegitimacy and the Influence of Seasons on Conduct. 
 
 ALBERT LEFFINGWELL, M. D. 
 
 "We have not often seen a work based on statistics which is more continuously 
 interesting. " Westminster Review. 
 
 60. Commercial Crises of the Nineteenth Century. H. M. HYNDMAN. 
 
 " One of the best and most permanently useful volumes of the Series." Literary 
 Opinion. 
 
 61. The State and Pensions in Old Age. J. A. SPENDER and ARTHUR ACLAND, M.P. 
 
 " A careful and cautious examination of the question." Times. 
 
 62. The Fallacy of Saving. JOHN M. ROBERTSON. 
 
 " A plea for the reorganisation of our social and industrial system. "--Speaker. 
 
 63. The Irish Peasant. ANON. 
 
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 investigator." Daily Chronicle. 
 
 64. The Effects of Machinery on Wages. Prof. J. S. NICHOLSON, D.So. 
 
 " Ably reasoned, clearly stated, impartially written." Literary World. 
 66. The Social Horizon. ANON. 
 
 " A really admirable little book, bright, clear, and unconventional." Daily 
 Chronicle. 
 
 66. Socialism, Utopian and Scientific. FREDERICK ENGELS. 
 
 "The body of the book is still fresh and striking." Daily Chronicle. 
 
 67. Land Nationalisation. A. R. WALLACE. 
 
 "The most instructive and convincing of the popular works on the subject." 
 National Reformer. 
 
 68. The Ethic of Usury and Interest. Rev. W. BLISSARD. 
 
 " The work is marked by genuine ability." North British Agriculturalist. 
 
 69. The Emancipation of Women. ADELE CREPAZ 
 
 " By far the most comprehensive, luminous, and penetrating work on this question 
 that I have yet met with." Extract from Mr. GLADSTONE'S Preface. 
 
 60. The Eight Hours' Question. JOHN M. ROBERTSON 
 
 "A very cogent and sustained argument on what is at present the unpopular 
 side." Times. 
 
 61. Drunkenness. GEORGE R. WILSON, M.B. 
 
 " Well written, carefully reasoned, free from cant, and full of sound sense." 
 National Observer. 
 
 62. The New Reformation. RAMSDEN BALMFORTM. 
 
 " A striking presentation of the nascent religion, how best to realize the personal 
 and social ideal." Westminster Review. 
 
 63. The Agricultural Labourer. T. E. KEBBEL. 
 
 "A short summary of his position, with appendices on wages, education, allot 
 ments, etc., etc." 
 
 64. Ferdinand Lassallo as a Social Reformer. E. BERNSTEIN 
 
 " A worthy addition to the Social Science Series." North British Kconomizt.
 
 SOCIAL SCIENCE SERIES- (Continued}. 
 
 65. England's Foreign Trade In XlXth Century. A. L. BOWLEY. 
 
 " Full of valuable information, carefully compiled, and skilfully marshalled." 
 Times. 
 
 66. Theory and Policy of Labour Protection. Dr. SCHAFFLE. 
 
 " Remarkable as an attempt to systematize a conservative programme of reform." 
 Manchester Gvardian. 
 
 67. History of Rochdale Pioneers. G. J. HOLYOAKE. 
 
 " The first complete edition, brought down from 1844 to the Rochdale Congress of 
 1892." Co-Operative Sews. 
 
 68. Bights of Women. M. OSTKAGOBSKI. 
 
 "Advocates and opponents will find it an admirable storehouse of precedents, 
 collected from authentic sources, carefully brought up to date, supported by exact 
 references, and conveniently arranged." Daily Chronicle. 
 
 69. Dwellings of the People. LOCKE WORTHIXGTON. 
 
 " An effective and valuable contribution to one of the most pressing problems of 
 the day." Daily Chronicle. 
 
 70. Hours, Wages, and Production. Dr. BRENTANO. 
 
 " Substantially a new work on the relation between wages and hours of labour 
 and the work done characterised by all Professor Brentano's clearness of style 
 and fulness of historical detail." Economic Review. 
 
 71. Rise of Modern Democracy. CH. BOBGEAUD. 
 
 "A very useful little volume, characterised by exact research and by very clear 
 political ideas." Daily Chronicle. 
 
 72. Land Systems of Australasia. WM. EPPS. 
 
 " A laudable and very useful attempt to place before political thinkers an outline 
 of the methods which govern the use and alienation of the public land of the 
 Australasian Colonies." Times. 
 
 78. The Tyranny of Socialism. YVES GUYOT. 
 
 Edited with Introduction by J. H. LEVY. 
 " M. Quyot is smart, lively, trenchant, and interesting. " Daily Chronicle. 
 
 DOUBLE VOLUMES, Each 3s. 6d. 
 
 1. Life of Robert Owen. LLOYD JONES. 
 
 " A worthy record of a life of noble activities." Manchester Examiner. 
 
 2. The Impossibility of Social Democracy : a Second Part of " The Quintessence 
 
 of Socialism ". Dr. A. SCHAFFLE. 
 
 "Extremely valuable as a criticism of Social Democracy by the ablest living 
 representative of State Socialism in Germany." Inter. Journal of Ethics. 
 
 8. The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. FREDERICK EKGELS. 
 " A translation of a work written in 1845, with a preface written in 1892." 
 
 4. The Principles of Social Economy. YVES GUYOT. 
 
 " An interesting and suggestive work. It is a profound treatise on social economy, 
 and an invaluable collection of facts." Spectator. 
 
 6. Social Peace. Dr. SCHULZE-GAEVERUITZ. 
 
 Edited by GRAHAM- WALLES. 
 
 " A study by a competent observer of the industrial movement in England, and 
 the later developments of trade unionism." Times. 
 
 SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO., LONDON. 
 
 NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS.
 
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