Why is the apparently simple and direct action of collectivist reform diverted into so unexpected a channel? And in what new laws and institutions does modern England in particular and industrial society in general show that this new form of the state is upon us?
To these two questions I will attempt an answer in the two concluding divisions of this book.
VIII
The Reformers and Reformed Are Alike Making for the Servile State
There are two types of reformers working along the line of least resistance—These are the socialist and the practical man—The socialist again is of two kinds, the humanist and the statistician—The humanist would like both to confiscate from the owners and to establish security and sufficiency for the non-owners—He is allowed to do the second thing by establishing servile conditions—He is forbidden to do the first—The statistician is quite content so long as he can run and organise the poor—Both are canalised towards the servile state and both are shepherded off their ideal collectivist state—Meanwhile the great mass, the proletariat, upon whom the reformers are at work, though retaining the instinct of ownership, has lost any experience of it and is subject to private law much more than to the law of the courts—This is exactly what happened in the past during the converse change from slavery to freedom—Private law became stronger than public at the beginning of the Dark Ages—The owners welcomed the changes which maintained them in ownership and yet increased the security of their revenue—Today the non-owners will welcome whatever keeps them a wage-earning class but increases their wages and their security without insisting on the expropriation of the owners.
I propose in this section to show how the three interests which between them account for nearly the whole of the forces making for social change in modern England are all necessarily drifting towards the servile state.
Of these three interests the first two represent the reformers—the third the people to be reformed.
These three interests are, first, the “socialist,” who is the theoretical reformer working along the line of least resistance; secondly, the “practical man” who as a “practical” reformer depends on his shortness of sight, and is therefore today a powerful factor; while the third is that great proletarian mass for whom the change is being effected, and on whom it is being imposed. What they are most likely to accept, the way in which they will react upon new institutions is the most important factor of all, for they are the material with and upon which the work is being done.
(1) Of the “socialist” reformer:
I say that men attempting to achieve collectivism or socialism as the remedy for the evils of the capitalist state find themselves drifting not towards a collectivist state at all, but towards a servile state.
The socialist movement, the first of the three factors in this drift, is itself made up of two kinds of men: there is (a) the man who regards the public ownership of the means of production (and the consequent compulsion of all citizens to work under the direction of the state) as the only feasible solution of our modern social ills. There is also (b) the man who loves the collectivist ideal in itself, who does not pursue it so much because it is a solution of modern capitalism, as because it is an ordered and regular form of society which appeals to him in itself. He loves to consider the ideal of a state in which land and capital shall be held by public officials who shall order other men about and so preserve them from the consequences of their vice, ignorance, and folly.
These types are perfectly distinct, in many respects antagonistic, and between them they cover the whole socialist movement.
Now imagine either of these men at issue with the existing state of capitalist society and attempting to transform it. Along what line of least resistance will either be led?
(a) The first type will begin by demanding the confiscation of the means of production from the hands of their present owners, and the vesting of them in the state. But wait a moment. That demand is an exceedingly hard thing to accomplish. The present owners have between them and confiscation a stony moral barrier. It is what most men would call the moral basis of property (the instinct that property is a right), and what all men would admit to be at least a deeply rooted tradition. Again, they have behind them the innumerable complexities of modern ownership.
To take a very simple case. Decree that all common lands enclosed since so late a date as 1760 shall revert to the public. There you have a very moderate case and a very defensible one. But conceive for a moment how many small freeholds, what a nexus of obligation and benefit spread over millions, what thousands of exchanges, what purchases made upon the difficult savings of small men such a measure would wreck! It is conceivable, for, in the moral sphere, society can do anything to society; but it would bring crashing down with it twenty times the wealth involved and all the secure
