VII.--Business in England.
Wanted--More Profiteers
It is hardly necessary to say that so shrewd an observer as I am
could not fail to be struck by the situation of business in England.
Passing through the factory towns and noticing that no smoke came
from the tall chimneys and that the doors of the factories were
shut, I was led to the conclusion that they were closed.
Observing that the streets of the industrial centres were everywhere
filled with idle men, I gathered that they were unemployed: and when
I learned that the moving picture houses were full to the doors every
day and that the concert halls, beer gardens, grand opera, and
religious concerts were crowded to suffocation, I inferred that the
country was suffering from an unparalleled depression. This
diagnosis turned out to be absolutely correct. It has been freely
estimated that at the time I refer to almost two million men were out
of work.
But it does not require government statistics to prove that in
England at the present day everybody seems poor, just as in the
United States everybody, to the eye of the visitor, seems to be rich.
In England nobody seems to be able to afford anything: in the United
States everybody seems to be able to afford everything. In England
nobody smokes cigars: in America everybody does. On the English
railways the first class carriages are empty: in the United States
the "reserved drawingrooms" are full. Poverty no doubt is only a
relative matter: but a man whose income used to be 10,000 a year and
is now 5,000, is living in "reduced circumstances": he feels himself
just as poor as the man whose income has been cut from five thousand
pounds to three, or from five hundred pounds to two. They are all in
the same boat. What with the lowering of dividends and the raising of
the income tax, the closing of factories, feeding the unemployed and
trying to employ the unfed, things are in a bad way.
The underlying cause is plain enough. The economic distress that
the world suffers now is the inevitable consequence of the war.
Everybody knows that. But where the people differ is in regard to
what is going to happen next, and what we must do about it. Here
opinion takes a variety of forms. Some people blame it on the German
mark: by permitting their mark to fall, the Germans, it is claimed,
are taking away all the business from England; the fall of the
mark, by allowing the Germans to work harder and eat less than the
English, is threatening to drive the English out of house and home:
if the mark goes on falling still further the Germans will thereby
outdo us also in music, literature and in religion. What has got
to be done, therefore, is to force the Germans to lift the mark up
again, and make them pay up their indemnity.
Another more popular school of thought holds to an entirely contrary
opinion. The whole trouble, they say, comes from the sad
collapse of Germany. These unhappy people, having been too busy
for four years in destroying valuable property in France and Belgium
to pay attention to their home affairs, now find themselves collapsed:
it is our first duty to pick them up again. The English should
therefore take all the money they can find and give it to the
Germans. By this means German trade and industry will revive to
such an extent that the port of Hamburg will be its old bright self
again and German waiters will reappear in the London hotels. After
that everything will be all right.
Speaking with all the modesty of an outsider and a transient visitor,
I give it as my opinion that the trouble is elsewhere. The danger of
industrial collapse in England does not spring from what is happening
in Germany but from what is happening in England itself. England,
like most of the other countries in the world, is suffering from the
over-extension of government and the decline of individual self-help.
For six generations industry in England and America has flourished on
individual effort called out by the prospect of individual gain.
Every man acquired from his boyhood the idea that he must look after
himself. Morally, physically and financially that was the recognised
way of getting on. The desire to make a fortune was regarded as a
laudable ambition, a proper stimulus to effort. The ugly word
"profiteer" had not yet been coined. There was no income tax to turn
a man's pockets inside out and take away his savings. The world was
to the strong.
Under the stimulus of this the wheels of industry hummed. Factories
covered the land. National production grew to a colossal size and
the whole outer world seemed laid under a tribute to the great
industry. As a system it was far from perfect. It contained in
itself all kinds of gross injustices, demands that were too great,
wages that were too small; in spite of the splendour of the
foreground, poverty and destitution hovered behind the scenes. But
such as it was, the system worked: and it was the only one that we
knew.
Or turn to another aspect of this same principle of self-help. The
way to acquire knowledge in the early days was to buy a tallow candle
and read a book after one's day's work, as Benjamin Franklin read or
Lincoln: and when the soul was stimulated to it, then the aspiring
youth must save money, put himself to college, live on nothing, think
much, and in the course of this starvation and effort become a
learned man, with somehow a peculiar moral fibre in him not easily
reproduced to-day. For to-day the candle is free and the college is
free and the student has a "Union" like the profiteer's club and a
swimming-bath and a Drama League and a coeducational society at his
elbow for which he buys Beauty Roses at five dollars a bunch.
Or turn if one will to the moral side. The older way of being good
was by much prayer and much effort of one's own soul. Now it is done
by a Board of Censors. There is no need to fight sin by the power of
the spirit: let the Board of Censors do it. They together with three
or four kinds of Commissioners are supposed to keep sin at arm's
length and to supply a first class legislative guarantee of
righteousness. As a short cut to morality and as a way of saving
individual effort our legislatures are turning out morality
legislation by the bucketful. The legislature regulates our drink,
it begins already to guard us against the deadly cigarette, it
regulates here and there the length of our skirts, it safeguards our
amusements and in two states of the American Union it even proposes
to save us from the teaching of the Darwinian Theory of evolution.
The ancient prayer "Lead us not into temptation" is passing out of
date. The way to temptation is declared closed by Act of Parliament
and by amendment to the constitution of the United States. Yet oddly
enough the moral tone of the world fails to respond. The world is
apparently more full of thugs, hold-up men, yeg-men, bandits,
motor-thieves, porchclimbers, spotters, spies and crooked policemen
than it ever was; till it almost seems that the slow, old-fashioned
method of an effort of the individual soul may be needed still before
the world is made good.
This vast new system, the system of leaning on the government, is
spreading like a blight over England and America, and everywhere
we suffer from it. Government, that in theory represents a union
of effort and a saving of force, sprawls like an octopus over the
land. It has become like a dead weight upon us. Wherever it touches
industry it cripples it. It runs railways and makes a heavy deficit:
it builds ships and loses money on them: it operates the ships and
loses more money: it piles up taxes to fill the vacuum and when it
has killed employment, opens a bureau of unemployment and issues
a report on the depression of industry.
Now, the only way to restore prosperity is to give back again to the
individual the opportunity to make money, to make lots of it, and when
he has got it, to keep it. In spite of all the devastation of the war
the raw assets of our globe are hardly touched. Here and there, as in
parts of China and in England and in Belgium with about seven hundred
people to the square mile, the world is fairly well filled up. There
is standing room only. But there are vast empty spaces still.
Mesopotamia alone has millions of acres of potential wheat land with a
few Arabs squatting on it. Canada could absorb easily half a million
settlers a year for a generation to come. The most fertile part of the
world, the valley of the Amazon, is still untouched: so fertile is it
that for tens of thousands of square miles it is choked with trees, a
mere tangle of life, defying all entry. The idea of our humanity sadly
walking the streets of Glasgow or sitting mournfully fishing on the
piers of the Hudson, out of work, would be laughable if it were not
for the pathos of it.
The world is out of work for the simple reason that the world has
killed the goose that laid the golden eggs of industry. By taxation,
by legislation, by popular sentiment all over the world, there has
been a disparagement of the capitalist. And all over the world
capital is frightened. It goes and hides itself in the form of an
investment in a victory bond, a thing that is only a particular
name for a debt, with no productive effort behind it and indicating
only a dead weight of taxes. There capital sits like a bull-frog
hidden behind water-lilies, refusing to budge.
Hence the way to restore prosperity is not to multiply government
departments and government expenditures, nor to appoint commissions
and to pile up debts, but to start going again the machinery of bold
productive effort. Take off all the excess profits taxes and the
super-taxes on income and as much of the income tax itself as can be
done by a wholesale dismissal of government employees and then give
industry a mark to shoot at. What is needed now is not the
multiplication of government reports, but corporate industry, the
formation of land companies, development companies, irrigation
companies, any kind of corporation that will call out private capital
from its hiding places, offer employment to millions and start the
wheels moving again. If the promoters of such corporations presently
earn huge fortunes for themselves society is none the worse: and in
any case, humanity being what it is, they will hand back a vast part
of what they have acquired in return for LL.D. degrees, or bits of
blue ribbon, or companionships of the Bath, or whatever kind of glass
bead fits the fancy of the retired millionaire.
The next thing to be done, then, is to "fire" the government
officials and to bring back the profiteer. As to which officials
are to be fired first it doesn't matter much. In England people
have been greatly perturbed as to the use to be made of such
instruments as the "Geddes Axe": the edge of the axe of dismissal
seems so terribly sharp. But there is no need to worry. If the edge
of the axe is too sharp, hit with the back of it.
As to the profiteer, bring him back. He is really just the same
person who a few years ago was called a Captain of Industry and an
Empire Builder and a Nation Maker. It is the times that have changed,
not the man. He is there still, just as greedy and rapacious as
ever, but no greedier: and we have just the same social need of
his greed as a motive power in industry as we ever had, and indeed
a worse need than before.
We need him not only in business but in the whole setting of life, or
if not him personally, we need the eager, selfish, but reliant spirit
of the man who looks after himself and doesn't want to have a
spoon-fed education and a government job alternating with a
government dole, and a set of morals framed for him by a Board of
Censors. Bring back the profiteer: fetch him from the Riviera, from
his country-place on the Hudson, or from whatever spot to which he
has withdrawn with his tin box full of victory bonds. If need be, go
and pick him out of the penitentiary, take the stripes off him and
tell him to get busy again. Show him the map of the world and ask him
to pick out a few likely spots. The trained greed of the rascal will
find them in a moment. Then write him out a concession for coal in
Asia Minor or oil in the Mackenzie Basin or for irrigation in
Mesopotamia. The ink will hardly be dry on it before the capital will
begin to flow in: it will come from all kinds of places whence the
government could never coax it and where the tax-gatherer could never
find it. Only promise that it is not going to be taxed out of
existence and the stream of capital which is being dried up in the
sands of government mismanagement will flow into the hands of private
industry like a river of gold.
And incidentally, when the profiteer has finished his work, we can
always put him back into the penitentiary if we like. But we need
him just now.
