The Servile State

not very wealthy squire and represented by, say, locomotives in the Argentine, turns into two miles of palings for the pleasant back gardens of a thousand new officials under the Inebriates Bill, or is simply handed over to the shareholders of the Prudential under the Insurance Act. In the first case the locomotives have been given back to the Argentine, and after a long series of exchanges have been bartered against a great number of wood-palings from the Baltic⁠—not exactly reproductive wealth. In the second case the locomotives which used to be the squire’s hands become, or their equivalent becomes, means of production in the hands of the Sassoons. ↩

How true it is that the idea of status underlies this legislation can easily be tested by taking parallel cases, in one of which working men are concerned, in the other the professional class. If I contract to write for a publisher a complete History of the County of Rutland, and in the pursuit of that task, while examining some object of historical interest, fall down a pit, I should not be able to recover against the publisher. But if I dress in mean clothes, and the same publisher, deceived, gives me a month’s work at cleaning out his ornamental water and I am wounded in that occupation by a fierce fish, he will be mulcted to my advantage, and that roundly. ↩

September 1912. ↩

But it has twice been brought forward in due process as a bill in Parliament! ↩

Colophon

The Servile State
was published in 1912 by
Hilaire Belloc.

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