There is upon the one side (everywhere except in England) a now large, a believing, and a coherent Catholic body: there is upon the other side the mood of which I have spoken—the mood in which it is even thought worse to be cruel to an animal than to a man; the mood in which the existence and nature of the human soul are contentedly or discontentedly left aside as undiscoverable; the mood in which the most fundamental institutions of society may be questioned or denied; the mood in which the fixity of marriage is universally abandoned, and in which property has no longer a reasoned moral right. Indeed, in poor support of property (outside the Catholic philosophy) today only two rotten struts remain: first, the assertion that possession by a few in the midst of a free community is natural because it has always existed; that is mere ignorance of history: secondly, the asinine pretence that the few who possess have a right to possession through their greater virtue and intelligence—as for instance a millionaire eating uneatable things to the noise of an intolerable band in any one of our cosmopolitan hotels. …
I marvel that those who possess on such a tenure should not perceive the frailty of their tenure. They are, it is true, now fallen into a permanent state of panic, but they still have a vague conception that the present arrangement is in some ways secure.
It is not secure. It has no moral basis or custom behind it. The stability of a society depends upon an acceptation of its laws. If their enforcement is thought right, and the institutions which they defend are accepted by the conscience of men, the laws and society stand; if not, both fall.
But who today defends the right of our handful of rich men to govern as they do, and to control the state? How many even grant them a moral right to property? They are themselves the negation of property. They boldly proclaim that the overreaching of others, the catching-up of other men’s fortunes into their grasp by tricks, is the only talent they can exercise, and, indeed, the only one which they revere in their fellows. They have ruined that middle-class lacking which the institutions of the State, and particularly ownership, lose their foundation. Nevertheless, our society, of which these millionaires are today the masters, will not endure; for no one thinks of them as lords: all despise them, and the greater part of men have ceased to envy them, and have begun to hate. The rule they exercise through demagogy, and particularly through their purchase of the press, and (less important) through their purchase of the politicians, cannot endure. So much is certain; nor is it prophecy to affirm it any more than it is prophecy to affirm the consequences of a natural law. Yet does it not seem probable that when this ephemeral phase is over, normal freedom will return.
The mass of men in an industrial civilisation is now caught in a machine from which they cannot escape, and subservience to which has become at last their nature. Every day there die some number of those men and women who could still remember an England of the countrysides and of personal loyalties. Soon, very soon, there will be none left but those who, all their lives, have known nothing but the universal wage system of our towns.
It is this which makes the coming of compulsory labour in our great industrial cities probable enough. Anyone can see that there are only three possible solutions to the present insecurity of all public service. The best solution would be the production of a contented populace through the better distribution of property. Such a populace would, though workers, be interested in the stability and security of a society in which they were also partners; but that solution will not be reached, or even approached, because it is against the mentality of time; because it seems fantastic. The next solution is the servitude of all under a tyranny of public officials. It involves confiscation of property now owned by a few, and the organisation of the industrial world despotically under a group of politicians. It is called Socialism.
That will not come either, although it is the ideal still favoured by some few belated Utopians. It will not come because the rich are too powerful and the politicians too corrupt. If it did come, it would mean a complete breakdown of society—but that is by the way.
The third solution is compulsory labour legally conducted, as it is virtually conducted today, for the advantage of the owners; and that solution seems to be approaching.
When the general services of the community are interrupted by a strike—the necessary service of communication by rail, for example, or the necessary service of the modern post-office—the clamour for compulsory labour at once arises. It sounds reasonable. It is consonant to the mind of the whole community; and whether it is called arbitration or fixed contract, or disciplinary power of trades unions, compulsory labour is the underlying idea. It is close upon us.
But though the chance of servitude is a thing of the highest moment, I cannot help watching with amusement a small concomitant of the great process. I confess rather ashamedly to too great an interest in a subsidiary point, and that is, watching the euphemisms under which the process is covered.
For when men return to an old institution which they have discarded, and the proper name for which has grown odious (as we are returning to the enslavement of labour), they are particularly anxious to avoid that name, and spend much of their energy in discovering some way of getting the old thing under a new title—thus no one will call compulsory labour slavery, nor will even the words “compulsory” or “compulsion” appear on the surface. There will be some other term,
