Chapter I: The Poverty of the Poor

The outstanding and entirely unexpected result of the capitalist organization of society is the widespread penury that it produces in the nation. A ' whole century of experience, in the most advanced civilizations of Europe and America alike, reveals this widespread penury as the outcome, or at least the invariable concomitant, of the divorce of the mass of the people from the ownership of the instruments of production; and of the aggregation, which has everywhere occurred, of this ownership in a relatively small propertied class. It is of course not suggested that a low standard of livelihood and the imminent peril of starvation is peculiar to capitalism. In more primitive communities, in which the instruments of production are held in common, or are widely distributed among those who gain their livelihood by using them, chronic poverty and recurrent famines have been in the past, and are to-day, by no means uncommon. But in these backward societies the meagerness and insecurity of livelihood is attributable either to man's incapacity to control the forces of nature, as manifested in droughts, floods and diseases; or to the paucity of natural resources, such as the lack of fertile land and minerals, or the severity of the climate; or else to the absence of applied science enabling men to use with efficiency the sources of wealth that exist. But the capitalist organization of industry confronts us with a paradox. The countries in which it has been developed in its most complete form enjoy great natural resources and have made great use of science in turning them to the service of man. Taking these nations as wholes, the aggregate wealth thus produced is relatively enormous. Notwithstanding these favorable conditions, the material circumstances of the people, so far as the bulk of them are concerned and taking all things into account, have scarcely been bettered; they have been, sometimes, under unrestrained capitalism, actually worsened. There is reason to suppose that the England of the yeoman cultivator and the master craftsman, with all its privations and all its drawbacks, yielded to an actual majority of its inhabitants, more food, more serviceable clothing, more light, purer air, pleasanter surroundings, and, be it added, in practice even a greater degree of personal freedom, than did the far more productive England of the first half of the nineteenth century, when the "free enterprise" of the owners and organizers of the instruments of production was at its zenith.

The Results of the Industrial Revolution

The tragic process of this worsening of the conditions is described in every account of the industrial revolution, when the enthronement of the capitalist as the unrestrained exploiter of land, machinery and human labor was accompanied by results to the common people more terrible in prolonged agony than those of any war. So far as Great Britain is concerned, the account of what happened between 1760 and 1850 has, during the present generation, become a wearisome platitude of the history text - books, not only of the workman's tutorial class but even of the girls ' high school. But if we realize what happened it is difficult to write about it without passion. Relays of young children destroyed in the cotton factories; men and women, boys and girls, weakened and brutalized by promiscuous toil in mines and iron - works; whole families degraded by the indecent occupation of the tenement houses of the crowded slums; constantly recurrent periods of under - employment and unemployment, and consequent hunger and starvation; food adulterated, air poisoned, water contaminated, the sights and sounds of day and night rendered hideous: these are the commonplace incidents of the industrial Britain of the beginning of the nineteenth century, discovered and rediscovered, not by sentimental philanthropists and sensational newspaper reporters, but by departmental inspectors and parliamentary inquiries. It is usually forgotten that essentially similar evils are continuing to-day among the industrial populations in the slums of the great cities in America as well as in Europe to an extent that is positively greater in volume than existed under analogous conditions between 1800 and 1840.

Further, the physical suffering, the accidents and the diseases that have been the concomitants of the capitalist system have not been its biggest evil. It is not in material things only that "the destruction of the poor is their poverty." To the hero on the ice - field or the saint in the desert, the lack of adequate means of subsistence, combined with the utmost hardship, may be compatible with the spiritual exaltation, individual development, and the continuous exercise of personal initiative and enterprise. To the peasant cultivator and master - craftsman of primitive communities, a flood, or drought, an epidemic, the murrain or the blight, though it produces devastation and famine, may create fellowship and stimulate energy. But what modern industrialism destroyed, generation after generation, in those who succumbed to it, was the soul of the people. There is a moral miasma as deadly as the physical. Right down to our own day the dwellers in the slums of the great cities of Europe and America, actually in increasing numbers as one generation follows another, find themselves embedded, whether they will it or not, in all the ugliness, the dirt and the disorder of the mean streets. Breathing, from infancy up, an atmosphere of morbid alcoholism and sexuality, furtive larceny and unashamed mendacity - though here and there a moral genius may survive, saddened but unscathed - the average man is, mentally as well as physically, poisoned. The destitution against which the socialist protests is thus a degradation of character, a spiritual demoralization, a destruction of human personality itself.

The Evils Not Intended

In the opening sentence of this chapter we described those appalling results of capitalism as unexpected. They are, in fact, too bad to have been intentionally brought about by human beings at any stage of civilization, much less at a period so full of humanitarian and libertarian sentiment and of intelligent progressive aspiration as the period extending from the careers of Voltaire and Rousseau to those of Shelley and Cobden. As the judge in Ibsen's play remarks, "People don't do such things." That nevertheless those things were done, and are still in the doing, is explained by the fact that the first effects of capitalism correspond to certain natural consequences which have an air of justice and propriety agreeable to the uninstructed moral sense of mankind, and are accompanied by the breaking down of restrictions on enterprise the reasonableness of which is apparent to trained statesmen only. If A becomes poor and B becomes rich, other things remaining equal, our sense of justice is shocked and our compassion and indignation aroused. But if simultaneously with the change in relative income A ' and his family become repulsively dirty, drunken, and ignorant, and B becomes attractively well - groomed and invites us to share a delightful hospitality at the hands of his charmingly dressed wife and daughters; and if this state of things is clearly and directly traceable to the fact that A is living recklessly beyond his income and B saving money every year, nine hundred and ninety - nine men out of a thousand will conclude that poetic justice demands this very retribution and reward; that A has himself to thank for his poverty, which is a socially wholesome deterrent from his vices; and that all can be as prosperous as B if they will follow his example. And if, in addition, B breaks down a very obvious feudal tyranny, and wins for all persons like himself the political predominance their apparent virtues seem to deserve, an overwhelming impression of progress and enlightenment will be produced.

It is not until the inequalities have gone so far that they are beyond all reason that people began to suspect that A's degradation is effect and not cause, and B's prosperity is cause and not effect. When a baby in one street owns a million pounds actually before it is born, and a woman who has worked hard from her eighth year to her eightieth is removed from another to die in the workhouse, eighteenth-century optimism begins to lose confidence.

But Presently Condoned

But even when the optimism is staggered, it does not surrender. It changes its ground, and begins to argue that the poverty of the poor is the inevitable price of a general improvement in the condition of mankind. There seems to be no limit to the willingness of fortunate men—even men of high ideals and great devotion—to accept excuses for the suffering of other people, so long as this suffering seems to be necessary to the maintenance of the position or the interests of their class or race. There were men of exceptionally fine character and intellect among the slave - owning legislators of the Southern States of America who were, right down to Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House, passionately convinced that slavery and the slave market formed the only possible basis for the social order that seemed to them indispensable to civilization. In the universities as well as in the armies of Germany in 1914-18 there were men of high morality and trained intelligence who honestly regarded the invasion of neutral Belgium, the devastation of occupied areas, the enforcement of labor on civilians, and the sinking of passenger ships, as regrettable necessities incidental to the fulfillment of Germany's civilizing mission as the dominating world - power. In like manner we watch such patriots as Bright and Cobden, with their following of well - intentioned capitalists, condoning and justifying conditions of employment and housing which were almost as degrading as the chattel slavery they were denouncing, and which resulted, in England alone, in far more preventable disease and deaths in a single year than all the casualties of the Crimean war. And it was not only the business men and slum landlords who tolerated and defended this mass of misery and degradation. In the England of the first half of the nineteenth century, as in the Germany of the Great War, men of science and men of God—"instructors and chaplains of a pirate ship" —justified the actions of the practical men of their own world. The horrors of the unregulated factory, the mine and slum—made abstract in what was called "the natural rate of wages" —were defended by Ricardo and Nassau Senior among the intellectuals, by the Rev. Thomas Malthus and Archbishop Whately among the priests, as the last discoveries of the science of political economy, and part and parcel of the Law of God as manifested in the doctrines of the Christian Church. "Without a large proportion of poverty," England was told by the inventor of the modern police system and leading authority on "the resources of the British Empire," " there could be no riches, since riches are the offspring of labor, while labor can result only from a state of poverty. Poverty is that state and condition of society where the individual has no surplus labor in store, or, in other words, no property or means of subsistence but what is derived from the constant exercise of industry. Poverty is therefore a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilization. It is the lot of man. It is the source of wealth, since without poverty there could be no labor, no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth, inasmuch as, without a large proportion of poverty, surplus labor could never be rendered productive in procuring either the conveniences or luxuries of life."¹

The Modern Apologia

It must not be imagined that this callousness to the suffering of the "common people," on the part of kindly natures and otherwise good citizens, is merely an incident of the past. Any one who takes the trouble to observe the minds of the people around him, of the "well-to-do" or comfortable class, in Britain or France, Australia or the United States, whether manufacturers or mere dividend-receivers, statesmen or professors, will easily discover how complacently they assume, as a matter of course, first, that the relative position of the property owners and the property-less has some real though undefined relation to their several deserts or racial qualities; and secondly, that, whether or not this is the case, the existence of an extensive property-less class is a necessary condition of their own exemption from manual toil and their wide opportunities for personal initiative, which are deemed indispensable for civilization and culture. Thus a tacit acceptance of the penury, the continuing privations, and, as regards a large proportion of the wage-earners, the always imminent peril of want, as the lot of the bulk of the population, even in the richest countries, has survived the full realization both of the existence of these evils and of their causal connection with capitalism. We remember being startled by an astute Japanese statesman casually observing that "the introduction of the capitalist system into Japan had brought in its train an ever-growing class of destitute persons—a class quite unknown in the old Japan of the daimio and the rice cultivator. This destitution," he added, with a philosophic smile, "is the price which Japan has had to pay for increasing the personal wealth of her leading citizens, and for becoming a world power."

It is unnecessary to dwell in greater detail upon the poverty of the poor as the most obvious evil result of the "free enterprise" of the profit-making capitalist. Thinkers and statesmen of all shades of opinion nowadays recognize this poverty, and with more or less alacrity apply the remedial measures in limitation of the freedom of capitalist enterprise which they have learnt from the socialists of the past two or three generations, in an attempt to mitigate what they deplore. But these mitigations do not exhaust the problem. It is only the first achievement of socialist thought to have got accepted in Great Britain and Australasia, and, in all that has followed from Robert Owen's plea for factory legislation, to some extent applied, the essentially socialist policy of deliberately maintaining by law a national minimum of civilized life throughout the whole community. By a full adoption of this policy, as is now widely recognized, the nation can, if it chooses, prevent the recurrence of any widespread destitution. It can even put an end, so far as it is a case of a whole class, to the insecurity of livelihood which verges on destitution.² To accomplish even so much, if the statesmen would only take the task in hand, would be an enormous gain. But this process of leveling up, within the capitalist system, all sections of the community to a prescribed minimum standard of life—say to that of the skilled engineer in regular employment, or that of the assistant teacher in a public elementary school—will not, in itself, diminish, and, as we shall point out, may in the long run even increase the inequality, alike in material circumstances and in personal freedom, between the relatively small class of persons who own and organize the instruments of production and the mass of people whose livelihood depends on being permitted to use them.

Notes

1. Resources of the British Empire, by Patrick Colquhoun, 1914, quoted in A History of British Socialism, by M. Beer, vol. 1, p. 145.

"The palm in this line belongs to the English economist, the Rev. J. Townsend, who wrote under the name ' The Well-wisher of Mankind ' against the Poor Law. In his masterpiece, which lived to see a second edition—A Dissertation on the Poor Laws (London, 1817), pp. 39-41, quoted by Marx, Capital, vol. i, pp. 602, 603—he explains to us that the poor are improvident and multiply rapidly in order 'that there may always be some to fulfill the most servile, the most sordid and the most ignoble offices in the community. The stock of human happiness is thereby much increased, whilst the more delicate are not only relieved from drudgery but are left without interruption to pursue those callings callings which are suited to their various dispositions.' The Poor Law 'tends to destroy the harmony and beauty, the symmetry and order of that system which God and Nature have established in the world'" (Marxism v. Socialism, by Vladimir G. Simkovitch, 1913, p. 107). The reverend author was "rector of Pewsey, Wilts, and chaplain to Jean, Duchess Dowager of Atholl." His Dissertation on the Poor Laws was first published in 1786, and was more than once reprinted during the ensuing thirty years. ↩

2. For a full exposition of this policy and its application in practical detail, see The Prevention of Destitution, by S. and B. Webb, 1920. ↩