In this paper I am anxious to define and discuss the relationship between three distinct things:
(1) Socialism, i.e. a large, a slowly elaborating conception of a sane and organized state and moral culture to replace our present chaotic way of living,
(2) the Socialist movement, and
(3) the Middle Classes.
The first is to me a very great thing indeed, the form and substance of my ideal life, and all the religion I possess. Let me make
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my confession plain and clear. I am, by a sort of predestination, a Socialist. I perceive, I cannot help talking and writing about Socialism, and shaping and forwarding Socialism. I am one of a succession—one of a growing multitude of witnesses, who will continue. It does not—in the larger sense—matter how many generations of us must toil and testify. It does not matter, except as our individual concern, how individually we succeed or fail, what blunders we make, what thwartings we encounter, what follies and inadequacies darken our private hopes and level our personal imaginations to the dust. We have the light. We know what we are for, and that the light that now glimmers so dimly through us must in the end prevail. To us Socialism is no piece of political strategy, no economic opposition of class to class; it is a plan for the reconstruction of human life, for the replacement of a disorder by order, for the making of a state in which mankind shall live bravely and beautifully beyond our present imagining.
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So, largely, I conceive of Socialism. But Socialism and the Socialist movement are two very different things. The Socialist movement is an item in an altogether different scale.
I must confess that the organized Socialist movement, all the Socialist societies and leagues and federations and parties together in England, seem to me no more than the rustling hem of the garment of advancing Socialism. For some years the whole organized Socialist movement seemed to me so unimportant, so irrelevant to that progressive development and realization of a great system of ideas which is Socialism, that, like very many other Socialists, I did not trouble to connect myself with any section of it. I don’t believe that the Socialist idea is as yet nearly enough thought out and elaborated for very much of it to be realized of set intention now. Socialism is still essentially education, is study, is a renewal, a profound change in the circle of human thought and motive. The institutions which will express this changed circle of thought are important indeed,
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but with a secondary importance. Socialism is the still incomplete, the still sketchy and sketchily indicative plan of a new life for the world, a new and better way of living, a change of spirit and substance from the narrow selfishness and immediacy and cowardly formalism, the chaotic life individual accident that is human life to-day, a life that dooms itself and all of us to thwartings and misery. Socialism, therefore, is to be served by thought and expression, in art, in literature, in scientific statement and life, in discussion and the quickening exercise of propaganda; but the Socialist movement, as one finds it, is too often no more than a hasty attempt to secure a premature realization of some fragmentary suggestion of this great, still plastic design, to the neglect of all other of its aspects. As my own sense of Socialism has enlarged and intensified, I have become more and more impressed by the imperfect Socialism of almost every Socialist movement that is going on; by its necessarily partial and limited projection from the clotted
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cants and habituations of things as they are. Some Socialists quarrel with the Liberal Party and with the Socialist section of the Liberal Party because it does not go far enough, because it does not embody a Socialism uncompromising and complete, because it has not definitely cut itself off from the old traditions, the discredited formulæ, that served before the coming of our great idea. They are blind to the fact that there is no organized Socialism at present, uncompromising and complete, and the Socialists who flatter themselves they represent as much are merely those who have either never grasped or who have forgotten the full implications of Socialism. They are just a little step further, a very little step further in their departure from existing prejudices, in their subservience to existing institutions and existing imperatives.
Take, for example, the Socialism that is popular in New York and Chicago and Germany, and that finds its exponents here typically in the inferior ranks of the Social
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Democratic Federation—the crude Marxite teaching. It still awaits permeation by true Socialist conceptions. It is a version of life adapted essentially to the imagination of the working wage earner, and limited by his limitations. It is the vision of poor souls perennially reminded each Monday morning of the shadow and irksomeness of life, perpetually recalled each Saturday pay time to a watery gleam of all that life might be. One of the numberless relationships of life, the relationship of capital or the employer to the employed, is made to overshadow all other relations. Get that put right, “expropriate the idle rich,” transfer all capital to the State, make the State the humane, amenable, universal employer—that, to innumerable, Socialist working men, is the horizon. The rest he sees in the forms of the life to which he is accustomed. A little home, a trifle larger and brighter than his present one, a more abounding table, a cheerful missus released from factory work and unhealthy competition with men, a bright and healthy
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family going to and fro to the public free schools, free medical attendance, universal State insurance for old age, free trams to Burnham Beeches, shorter hours of work and higher wages, no dismissals, no hunting for work that eludes one. All the wide world of collateral consequences that will follow from the cessation of the system of employment under conditions of individualist competition, he does not seem to apprehend. Such phrases as the citizenship and economic independence of women leave him cold. That Socialism has anything to say about the economic basis of the family, about the social aspects of marriage, about the rights of the parent, doesn’t, I think, at first occur to him at all. Nor does he realize for a long time that for Socialism and under Socialist institutions will there be needed any system of self-discipline, any rules of conduct further than the natural impulses and the native goodness of man. He takes just that aspect of Socialism that appeals to him, and that alone, and it is only exceptionally at present, and very slowly,
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as a process of slow habituation and enlargement, that he comes to any wider conceptions. And, as a consequence, directly we pass to any social type to which weekly or monthly wages is not the dominating fact of life, and a simple unthinking faith in Yes or No decisions its dominant habit, the phrasings, the formulæ, the statements and the discreet omissions of the leaders of working-class Socialism fail to appeal.
Socialism commends itself to a considerable proportion of the working class simply as a beneficial change in the conditions of work and employment; to other sections of the community it presents itself through equally limited aspects. Certain ways of living it seems to condemn root and branch. To the stockbroker and many other sorts of trader, to the usurer, to the company promoter, to the retired butler who has invested his money in “weekly property,” for example, it stands for the dissolution of all comprehensible social order. It simply repudiates the way of living to which they have committed themselves.
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And to great numbers of agreeable unintelligent people who live upon rent and interest it is a projected severing of every bond that holds man and man, that keeps servants respectful, tradespeople in order, railways and hotels available, and the whole procedure of life going. They class Socialism and Anarchism together in a way that is as logically unjust as it is from their point of view justifiable. Both cults have this in common, that they threaten to wipe out the whole world of the villa resident. And this sense of a threatened profound disturbance in their way of living pervades the attitude of nearly all the comfortable classes towards Socialism.
When we discuss the attitude of the middle classes to Socialism we must always bear this keener sense of disconcerting changes in mind. It is a part of the queer composition of the human animal that its desire for happenings is balanced by an instinctive dread of real changes of condition. People, especially fully adult people, are creatures who have grown accustomed to a certain method
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of costume, a certain system of meals, a certain dietary, certain apparatus, a certain routine. They know their way about in life as it is. They would be lost in Utopia. Quite little alterations “put them out,” as they say—create a distressing feeling of inadequacy, make them “feel odd.” Whatever little enlargements they may contemplate in reverie, in practice they know they want nothing except, perhaps, a little more of all the things they like. That’s the way with most of us, anyhow. To make a fairly complete intimation of the nature of Socialism to an average, decent, middle-aged, middle-class person would be to arouse emotions of unspeakable terror, if the whole project didn’t also naturally clothe itself in a quality of incredibility. And you will find, as a matter of fact, that your middle-class Socialists belong to two classes; either they are amiable people who don’t understand a bit what Socialism is—and some of the most ardent and serviceable workers for Socialism are of this type—or they are people so unhappily
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situated and so unfortunate, or else of such exceptional imaginative force or training (which is itself, perhaps, from the practical point of view, a misfortune), as to be capable of a discontent with life as it is, so passionate as to outweigh instinctive timidities and discretions. Rest assured that to make any large section of the comfortable upper middle class Socialists, you must either misrepresent, and more particularly under-represent Socialism, or you must quicken their imaginations far beyond the present state of affairs.
Some of the most ardent and serviceable of Socialist workers, I have said, are of the former type. For the most part they are philanthropic people, or women and men of the managing temperament shocked into a sort of Socialism by the more glaring and melodramatic cruelties of our universally cruel social system. They are the district visitors of Socialism. They do not realize that Socialism demands any change in themselves or in their way of living, they perceive in it simply a way of hope from the
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failures of vulgar charity. Chiefly they assail the bad conditions of life of the lower classes. They don’t for a moment envisage a time when there will be no lower classes—that is beyond them altogether. Much less can they conceive of a time when there will be no governing class distinctively in possession of means. They exact respect from inferiors; no touch of Socialist warmth or light qualifies their arrogant manners. Perhaps they, too, broaden their conception of Socialism as time goes on, but so it begins with them. Now to make Socialists of this type the appeal is a very different one from the talk of class war and expropriation, and the abolition of the idle rich, which is so serviceable with a roomful of sweated workers. These people are moved partly by pity, and the best of them by a hatred for the squalor and waste of the present régime. Talk of the expropriated rich simply raises in their minds painful and disconcerting images of distressed gentlewomen. But one necessary aspect of the Socialist’s vision that sends the coldest
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shiver down the spine of the working class Socialist is extraordinarily alluring and congenial to them, namely, the official and organized side. They love to think of houses and factories open to competent inspection, of municipal milk, sealed and certificated for every cottager’s baby, of old age pensions and a high and rising minimum standard of life. They have an admirable sense of sanitation. They are the philanthropic and administrative Socialists as distinguished from the economic revolutionaries.
This class of Socialist passes insensibly into the merely Socialistic philanthropist of the wealthy middle class to whom we owe so much helpful expenditure upon experiments in housing, in museum and school construction, in educational endowment, and so forth. Their activities are not for one moment to be despised; they are a constant demonstration to dull and sceptical persons that things may be different, better, prettier, kindlier and more orderly. Many people impervious to tracts can be set thinking by
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a model village or a model factory. However petty much of what they achieve may be, there it is achieved—in legislation, in bricks and mortar. Among other things, these administrative Socialists serve to correct the very perceptible tendency of most working men Socialists to sentimental anarchism in regard to questions of control and conduct, a tendency due entirely to their social and administrative inexperience.
For more thorough-going Socialism among the middle classes one must look to those strata and sections in which quickened imaginations and unsettling influences are to be found. The artist should be extraordinarily attracted by Socialism. A mind habitually directed to beauty as an end must necessarily be exceptionally awake to the ugly congestions of our contemporary civilisation, to the prolific futile production of gawky, ill-mannered, jostling new things, to the shabby profit-seeking that ousts beauty from life and poisons every enterprise of man. And not only artistic work, but the better sort of
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scientific investigation, the better sort of literary work, and every occupation that involves the persistent free use of thought, must bring the mind more and more towards the definite recognition of our social incoherence and waste. But this by no means exhausts the professions that ought to have a distinct bias for Socialism. The engineer, the architect, the mechanical inventor, the industrial organizer, and every sort of maker must be at one in their desire for emancipation from servitude to the promoter, the trader, the lawyer, and the forestaller, from the perpetually recurring obstruction of the claim of the private proprietor to every large and hopeful enterprise, and ready to respond to the immense creative element in the Socialist idea. Only it is that creative element which has so far found least expression in Socialist literature, which appears neither in the “class war” literature of the working class Socialist nor the litigious, inspecting, fining, and regulating tracts and proposals of the administrative Socialist. To too many
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of these men in the constructive professions the substitution of a Socialist State for our present economic method carries with it no promise of emancipation at all. They think that to work for the public controls which an advance towards Socialism would set up, would be worse for them and for all that they desire to do than the profit-seeking, expense-cutting, mercenary making of the present régime.
This is, I believe, a temporary and alterable state, contrary to the essential and permanent spirit of those engaged in constructive work. It is due very largely to the many misrepresentations and partial statements of Socialism that have rendered it palatable and assimilable to the working men and the administrative Socialist. Socialism has been presented on the one hand as a scheme of expropriation to a clamorous popular government of working men, far more ignorant and incapable of management than a shareholders’ meeting, and, on the other, as a scheme for the encouragement of stupid little
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municipal authorities of the contemporary type in impossible business undertakings under the guidance of fussy, energetic, legal minded and totally unscientific instigators. Except for the quite recent development of Socialist thought that is now being embodied in the New Heptarchy Series of the Fabian Society, scarcely anything has been done to dispel these reasonable dreads. I should think that from the point of view of Socialist propaganda, the time is altogether ripe now for a fresh and more vigorous insistence upon the materially creative aspect of the Vision of Socialism, an aspect which is after all, much more cardinal and characteristic than any aspect that has hitherto been presented systematically to the world. An enormous rebuilding, remaking, and expansion is integral in the Socialist dream. We want to get the land out of the control of the private owners among whom it is cut up, we want to get houses, factories, railways, mines, farms out of the dispersed management of their proprietors, not in order to secure their
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present profits and hinder development, but in order to rearrange these things in a saner and finer fashion. An immense work of replanning, rebuilding, redistributing lies in the foreground of the Socialist vista. We contemplate an enormous clearance of existing things. We want an unfettered hand to make beautiful and convenient homes, splendid cities, noiseless great highways, beautiful bridges, clean, swift and splendid electric railways; we are inspired by a faith in the coming of clean, wide and simple methods of agricultural production. But it is only now that Socialism is beginning to be put in these terms. So put it, and the engineer and the architect and the scientific organizer, agricultural or industrial—all the best of them, anyhow—will find it correspond extraordinarily to their way of thinking.
Not all of them, of course. A middle-aged architect with a note-book full of bits of gothic, and a reputation for suburban churches, or full of bits of “Queen Anne” and a connexion among villa builders, or an engineer
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paterfamilias who has tasted blood as an expert witness, aren’t to be won by these suggestions. They’re part of things as they are. But that is only a temporary inconvenience to Socialism. The young men do respond, and they are the future and what Socialism needs.
And there’s another great constructive profession that should be Socialist altogether, and that is the medical profession. Especially does Socialism claim the younger men who haven’t yet sunken from the hospitals to the trading individualism of a practice. And then there are the teachers, the schoolmasters and schoolmistresses. The idea of a great organized making is innate in the quality of their professions; the making of sound bodies and healthy conditions, the making of informed and disciplined minds. The methods of the profit-seeking schoolmaster, the practice-buying doctor are imposed upon the............