Inside the British isles

Contents

CHAPTEE PAGE

I Democracy on the March 3

II Labor 14*

Chapter I

England has acted on the world as a principle of release for freedom, sometimes by irritating it into activity, as with the American colonies, sometimes by cooperating with it, as in Canada and Australia. The balance of power has departed from England to a wider area. But the principle of government which creates and directs that power continues to be an English principle. It is the principle of democratic control. One hundred years ago England was in a war in which her three leaders were Pitt, Wellington, and Nelson, three Englishmen. To-day Great Britain is in a war in which her three leaders are Lloyd- George, Haig, and Beatty, a Welshman, a Scotchman, and an Irishman. That is of course only a chance illustration, but it serves to show the fact that the field of opportunity has broadened, and that England is no longer the overshadowing power in a union, but is the equal among equals.

If that extension of power among her members is true of England on her island, it is also true of her among her colonies. Already the new cabinet has called the dominions to a special war conference. This is the first step in a momentous change in the constitution of the empire. The peoples of the dominions are not contented with their status, and they refuse to go on indefinitely under the present arrangement, which focuses all imperial responsibihty in the hands of statesmen of the British Isles. They determined to have a voice in foreign policy, and in the creation of an interlocking imperial domestic policy, which will organize the resources of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and India. The constitutional reconstruction calls for an imperial cabinet, answerable in authority to an imperial parliament of all the democracies of the empire.

The result of this will be the most populous, largest, most powerful state in the world, and that state will not be an autocracy. It will be a commonwealth, an agreement of equals. It will act from one will, with one purpose. The operations of that will inside so vast an organism will seem almost like a process of nature. Its influence will be decisive on the immediate future of the himian race. Under the perfected internal organization, which is the very purpose of the union, the food-supply of a quarter of mankind will be guaranteed. The land question will be solved. The balance of agriculture to industry will be determined and estabhshed. The problems of labor will be dealt with in a freedom of opportunity and an increase of productive power which would have seemed Utopian to an earlier generation. That imperial parliament will be a league of peace which" will give the first stable basis for a world peace.

This will be the greatest extension of democratic control ever apphed to the map of the world. The dimensions of it are so large that the imagination even of its projectors has not wakened to what it implies. A great organism of democracies, excepting only India, will exist in a world still half in political bondage. It will carry its community far along in the twofold purpose of all government — the control of environment and the betterment of human relationships. Suppose the bundle of states in Europe were suddenly to be thrown together in a vast repubhcan state of common purpose, determined on a unified domestic and foreign pohcy, then we should have no more amazing entity than in this plan of the new British commonwealth. Impossible, of course, for Evu-ope, because there is no central principle, overriding differences of tradition, race, and language ; but possible and about to be consummated iu the empire, because the central principle of democratic control is accepted, and because the kinship of blood and language exists. And it is all so obvious. The synthesis, once stated, demands its own reahzation. It is like the enlightenment which the faithful believe we shall receive after death, when we shall say, "Why, of course."

Such is the dream which British statesmen will proceed to put into execution at the close of the war. It is the war whose pressure has coalesced these five democracies, each busy with its own selfcontained and isolated life. A common danger and a common experience of suffering forced the realization of what a thoroughgoing partnership would bring in organization for industry and in the attainment of a good life. The war created a highly desirable friction between Great Britain and her colonial democracies, which revealed the present vmsatisfactory status and the need of a new order. Out of that friction has come the vision of the new commonwealth.

In the light of this far-flung scheme, the cabinet changes at Westminster seem petty. But they are actually in part a response to it. In England's reach toward this new synthesis she has instinctively turned to the men who have shown, either recently or in long years of service, an vmderstanding that England is not the British Empire, but that the British Empire is in process of becoming itself a single state, the greatest in the world. The changes in the ministry are riot alone expressions of the desire to win the war, but they indicate a drift of thought, only half-conscious as yet, toward the future commonwealth, toward the unification of the little unrelated democracies which England has sown around the world.

The British democracy believes it has found its group of leaders for the present crisis in the new cabinet. Its will is to win the war, and it begins, though dimly, to sense the need of imperial reconstruction. When the need swings back acutely to the internal problems of labor adjustment, this cabinet will be swiftly displaced if it fails to function in the new demand, or certain of its members will pass over to the new imperial ministry and parliament. The British public has to think in three separate and almost unrelated provinces. It finds itself unable to do this simultaneously, so it takes them up in turn. It expresses that shift of attention by cabinet changes. It has to think in terms of domestic policy, of imperial policy, and of international policy. The Tory type of mind has a traditional imperial and foreign policy which is firm, clear-cut, and which carries a weight of experience. (I am not speaking of "politics" in using the word "Tory." I am speaking of the political philosophy, the type of mind, of such men as Milner, Balfour, Bonar Law, Curzon, and Carson.) So, when the democracy found itself at grips with a crisis which calls for an imperial and foreign policy, it turned to leaders who inherited that tradition and who therefore could answer the immediate need. The claim of certain observers that the present group of imperial executives, agricultural and educational experts, and business captains, are a reactionary force, revealing the breakdown of democracy in time of strain, is a failure to see one of the central principles of democratic government. Democratic government is a government by experts, interpreting the collective will of the people. We shall probably see a series of cabinet shifts in the next five years, as each of the three great problems of British policy is taken up. The limelight will flit from Manchester and South Wales to Ireland, and then to Australia, and then to Russia, and public opinion wiU demand a very distinct set of faculties, and therefore of leaders, in dealing with each of these various questions.

Since the war began many persons have asked. Can a democracy produce leaders of the same merit as an autocracy? And the answer has often been No. But the question fails to state the problem. War leaders are one requirement, imperial leaders are another, and the creatprs of domestic policy are a third. Let us state the need in these terms:

1. Can a democracy produce leaders in peace times who can shape legislation and give guidance to the democratic movement? The mass of the people have developed a collective will, which demands a reconstruction of the state, expressed in terms of parliamentary control (manhood suffrage, the predominance of the House of Commons over the House of Lords) ; and a reconstruction of industry and the institution of property, expressed in terms of social legislation, affecting land reform, minimum wage, and control of collective enterprise, such as mines and railways, and further expressed in free experiment outside legal enactment, though later to be incorporated in legislative acts, such as workshop councils. Those leaders of peace Great Britain produced. Her swift adjustments to the demands of modern self-conscious democracy have proved that she is the fertile mother of democratic initiative.

2. Can a democracy produce leaders under the strain of international crisis who can carry through a determined poUcy demanding organization, efficiency, applied science, and a spiritual unity? This requirement is distinct from the requirements of a wise domestic policy. The reason is plain. The dealings of a nation with its citizens have reached a level of sanity, intelligence, and ethical decency which the dealings of nation with nation have not reached. Internationally, we are in the jungle. To handle these international relationships of greed and hate, the nation has to employ brute force. It has to turn its farmers into killers. It has to make shells in place of workers' cottages. But even while this need is most acute, and because it is acute, there arose in Great Britain the demand for a policy which would draw the sprawled-out empire into one state. The present cabinet is the answer to that demand.

To the question. Can a democracy produce leaders? the British people reply that they are selecting their leaders according to their need, and that, in doing so, they are proving a democratic principle. It is not an abrogation of the democratic principle when a people turns to its experts. It is one expression of the democratic principle. For democracy brought in two things when it entered life with the organization of the industrial revolution. It brought in a mass movement and it brought in specialization. The collective will must always turn to experts to organize its desires into action. It will control those experts, but it will never supersede them. It exercises its control in the choice of them, not in itself attempting tasks of which it is ignorant. A democracy in itself can liberate only an impulse. It cannot frame emergency measures by initiative and referendum. It will always be called on from time to time to pass over its power to a handful of speciahsts and trust them to use its mass momentum in the right direction toward the desired end.

The democratic movement began consciously with the purpose of freeing the human race from poverty. But it has steadily undergone a broadening of purpose imder the pressure of its own requirements. It has found that for self-preservation it must include the release of talent and the creation of spiritual values in its program. To produce leaders and to enhance the meaning of life are as much within its province as a proper standard of living in terms of hours and wages. It recognizes its need of an aristocracy of talent. The leaders of the democratic movement state this: such men as A. E., Wells, Zimmern, and Sidney Webb. This aristocracy will include social experts, artists, ethical leaders, teachers, imperial executives, organizers, and specialists in foreign policy. War is only one of the many situations where the democracy, with its distributed responsibihty, does not possess in itself the necessary intelUgence and unity of pohcy to master the sudden crisis. The democracy is only fulfilling its own nature in recognizing a diversity of gifts.

But through all the adjustments of the coming years, calling for expert treatment, the principle of democratic control will prevail. In time the democracy will develop its own tradition of policy and service and generate its own leaders. The common people of Great Britain have never spoken. It was therefore beheved they were dimib. But they were not dimib ; they were only inarticulate. The common people of Great Britain have never acted with common purpose to one end. It was therefore beheved that they were impotent. But they were not impotent; they were only unawakened. Now they are learning to speak and to act.

Chapter II Labor The Social Revolution In England

The opinion has been wide-spread among social workers in America that the war has crushed liberahsm in England. They have formed this opinion because social work has been postponed, trade-union rules have been abrogated, dissenters hke Bertrand A. W. Russell silenced, Russian revolutionary centers in London suppressed. But it is a characteristic of experts working in details to miss the main currents of tendency. No friend of radical democracy need be worried by the results of the last two years. The blood spilled by the working-classes at the front has been justified by the profoimd modifications wrought in English consciousness. A nation mobilized and under arms is a rich field for radical ideas. Blood fertilizes the soil for change. Those of the school of Curzon and Gwynne, who believed that the good old days of special privilege would be restored by conscription, are doomed to an awakening more thorough tnan befell the French reactionaries of 1790. For this is not an affair of a few noble heads. It is the remaking of a nation. ,

England is taking strides toward cooperative sociahsm. For the first time in their history, the English are thinking in terms of a state — "a modern state, in all its complexity, with scientific laws and regulations." This is a view "utterly strange to English thought, steeped as it always had been in empiricism, and only inclined to such piecemeal legislation as a particular grievance or a particular occasion might demand." I am quoting a government investigator. These tendencies were already in operation before the war ; but what might have required twenty-five years to bring to a head, the war has accelerated, intensified, and even altered.

It is a misreading of Enghsh character to think that anything remotely resembling the state socialism of Germany, the card-indexing of the community for vocational training, the regimenting of the intellectual life into a body of statecontrolled professors, will result from the present English revolution. The social change in England is not coming with any such over-emphasized nationalism. The Enghshman wants to be let alone for all his personal choices. He wants to disagree with official statements. He will not be coerced even for "his good," as that good is seen by another. Nor will the change come as an indeterminate, spreading internationalism, such as has infected radical thought'^ for half a century. It will be English, inside an Enghsh environment.

There are two truths so plain that we wonder it required a hundred years to find them out. It is the war that has finally revealed them to our blind eyes. The first truth is that high wages give high productiveness.. A well-fed, self-respecting, healthy workman can do more work than an under-nourished, servile workman. If the employer wants a good product and plenty of it, he must pay a living wage. The second truth is that workmen must work efficiently if they wish high wages. If they cut down productiveness there is no money to pay them. The war has smoked the workers out. Their sacred secret processes which required hours to work have turned out as simple as building-blocks. It is public knowledge now, the time it takes to do a piece of factory work. For years the worker has been limiting his output. A manufacturer of marine engines states that where thirteen rivets were turned out before the war, seventy are now being made by the same number of workers. The worker is making the same fight here that he made when he broke the first machines. The machines were robbing him of his living, he thought. Instead of that, they have given more men a better living. Of late years the worker has been fighting his own productivity. How is shrinking wealth to give him an expanding wage? Where is the money to come from? As a method in a given emergency, sabotage and limitation of output are effective ; but as a nation-wide policy they are instrimients that cut the hands of the user. The trade-unions surrender their hard-won regulations, and suddenly production leaps up as if it had been released from a dead-weight. They are still insisting on government guarantees that the old restrictions will be handed back to them after the war. It would be flattering to write

INSIDE THE BRITISH ISMES

that it is by labor that the constructive thinking is being done, but it would be untrue. There is absence of patient thought, lack of a constructive program, the muddle of a helpless creature caught unawares in a tidal wave.

It was the making of shells that taught England the new synthesis of capital and labor. Suddenly she was forced to turn out huge quantities of a product in order to save the lives of her people. Under that tragic pressure she had to learn overnight how to get a large product. She began in the manner dear to ruling classes: she started an old'-time "personal-morality" campaign of the evangelistic sort, and her most gifted exhorter, Lloyd-George, went out to down drink. She then preached thrift to the factory-worker. But she soon dropped that way of getting at it ; she stopped lecturing the laboring-man for his bad habits.

And swiftly she found the solution. It is this : State ownership of some factories ; state control of many factories ; state oversight of an ever-increasing number of factories; a conscription of abnormal profits for the community; a living wage; decent working conditions; limited hours of labor; no restriction of output; no sabotage; no discrimination by workers against workers, but all to be employed, union and non-imion, male and female; efficiency; the use of machinery up to its capacity instead of dribbling a process through a day where a half -day of proper handling would have completed the product.

There are broken planks all along the length of this platform. But every sag has meant decreased output, a longer war, more young men kiUed in battle. And once England had settled the main question with a measure of honesty, she found that some other things were added unto her. When she paid a living wage to people who had never had it before, and put before them a national ideal instead of a benefit for another class, she found that two million persons joined her national savings fund, thereby breaking an immemorial British habit. She found that her prisons had fewer inmates, that the personal morality of her inhabitants was in the main improved. She found that her school children in factory commimities were better nourished than they had been in the memory of the examining physicians. She found that her woman question solved itself. The very suffragette leaders, such as Mrs. Drummond and Mrs. Pankhurst, who had put gray hairs on Lloyd-George's head (and lines of worry into his face, recruited soldiers, explained the national need to the men miners of the north covmties, assisted in organizing masses of "unemployable" women into industrial workers, and were welcomed by Lloyd-George and the Government as efficient helpers in unifying the nation. And, far more important than the cooperation of a handful of leaders, the unrest and discontent of large numbers of women became transformed into energy.

While it is true that only half a million women have entered industry, that figvu-e is only a fraction of the nimiber of women who have transferred their activity from domestic service and the parasitic trades into the main channels of industry. In munitions alone five hvmdred thousand women have stepped over from unregulated hours and low wages to sharply defined hours and comparatively high wages. These women, and several himdred thousand others in factory processes, in railway, tram-car, and omnibus work, and in business superintendence, have "tasted blood." By that I mean they have won an increased freedom and independence, however imperfect even yet, and a higher wage. To send them " home" will prove a task larger than the paper resolutions of any men's trade-imion, that women workers must give up their jobs..

It is one more of time's ironic revenges that it is the entrance of women upon the scene which has precipitated social questions to solution, where before they were seething in separate, repellent elements. Woman's long campaign for the vote supplied the needed intellectual criticism of plural voting and of suffrage restricted to a property qualification. "Manhood" suffrage will be granted. It is not possible for a nation to deny a vote to men who have been ready to die for that nation. This manhood suffrage will include votes for women, for the women have mobilized with an equal loyalty.

Woman's irritating presence in industry has emphasized the demand for proper working conditions. It has sharpened the wage controversy, and it has revealed the need of far-reaching measures to deal with the unemployment situation that the nation will face on the day of peace. Women are not going to enter industry. They have already entered it, and half a miUion fresh workers have been added. It is clear that increasing the number of workers does not lessen the problem of a living wage. There is only one answer to the violently acute situation which has been forced by these women, and which will come to a crisis when five million men hang their khaki in the closet. The areas of production must be widened not tenderly and with the imperceptible gradualness of a natural process, but swiftly.

(1) The land must be broken up into small holdings. Cooperation in produce and marketing must be practised among the peasant tenants. Ireland has blazed the way here.

(2) The state must institute fields of activity at home, helping to establish new industries, such as dye-works. It must make use of an immense amount of new automatic machinery, installed to make shells, and adapted to an expansion of general engineering work and to the creation of new industries. The head of a motor-car company told me that two thirds of his present machinery has been created since the war. The report of the British Association states, "For the first time in the history of the west of Scotland engineering shops had been filled with modem machine tools." This enormous investment cannot be scrapped.

(3) The state must greatly extend its sphere of activities throughout the empire in cattle-raising, in developing raw lands, in producing commodities from the land.

These methods will be used to meet the imemployment situation by furnishing new jobs, and to meet the burden of increased taxation by giving an increased income. The larger program will of course be postponed till its advocates are more numerous and better organized. Such a program will include :

(1) An extension of transportation facilities, a greatly enlarged use of waterways, the building of new and better roads.

(2) Improved housing. The foul slums of great cities and towns, the vile homes of agricultural laborers, wiU have to be razed by as drastic a plan as that by which Haussmann drew his blue pencil down through the jungle of Paris. New dwellings in the place of the "lung blocks" must be, built.

(3) Afforestation. If it proves true that there are several million acres in the British Isles that are unfit for intensive agriculture, this area affords an opportunity for forest development, which in eighty years would offer rich returns to the state.

Under such an extension of enterprise there would be plenty of work after the war, and therefore plenty of jobs. The problem is how to obtain the money with which to finance the work. The war has shown how to get the money. The conscription of profits, death duties, and the taxation of incomes have availed, with new areas of production, to give a more wide-spread, betterdistributed prosperity to England than she enjoyed before the war. ■ It is the line of solution that will be enforced after the war. The exact pressure that will enforce it is the demand for a continuation of the present high wages.

This program is being postponed as long as possible. Its items will be applied unevenly, and parts will go neglected. Committees of Parhament are sure to bring in ingenious little outlines for legislation, which will affect a few thousand workers, while the army will demobilize at the rate of five thousand a day. But for every failure in boldness and energy, for every lag in execution, the nation will pay in decreased exports, falling wages, the pressure of taxation, and a wrangle between masters and men. The new order of life is still badly delayed at many points. The lot of the agricultural laborer is miserable. The "East Ends" of the industrial cities remain sodden. An immense nimiber of workers are being miderpaid, for the rise in wages has reached only a fraction. A ministry of commerce and a ministry of labor are needed at once, and in the ministry of labor there should be a department for women's work, conducted by women undersecretaries.

Wages and hours remain the heart of the social movement. The emphasis will not shift from wages and hours. But a new demand has been added to these "old timers." It is the demand by labor for a voice in the control of its working conditions. Mr. Lloyd-George responded to this demand by greatly increasing the scope of welfare work in factories. Through the famous manufacturer and social worker, Seebohm Rowntree, he has put protective agencies at work in munition factories which affect the lives of half a million persons who were not safeguarded to the same extent formerly. This safeguarding is done by welfare secretaries, whose duty it is to study the health, home conditions, and sanitary appliances of women. Grievances of workers are laid before these secretaries. Welfare secretaries are not a new arrival in British industry, but there were few of them in relation to the immense numbers of factories and workers. This movement toward conducting industry in its social relationship from the point of view of the worker is in its beginning. Labor will press on for an increasing recognition of its right to be heard in management in workshop adjustments, the speed of machinery, rest-times, hours of^work, details of discipline, and the grading of labor.

As this tide of reform rises higher, there is a back wash. Class education, land monopoly, a state church, persist down to our own day. England has continued in a modified, far less harsh form those special privileges of a ruling class that in France led to the overthrow of the nobility and the clergy. The industrial revolution of a century ago suddenly altered the texture of feudal English life, just as it would have altered France without the French Revolution. It added a new upper layer to the pressure from overhead on the manual worker in agriculture and industry, at the same time that it gave an ever-increasing population a share in the means of production. But the coming of machinery, creating a new world, was powerless in England to disturb the big land holdings, the church, and restricted education. They have continued to govern the conditions of hfe. The best defense of the class system which I have recently seen is that given in lectures to the University of Pennsylvania by Geoffrey Butler under the title of "The Tory Tradition." He clearly shows the contribution which has been made by the Tory rejection of a utilitarian standard, their distrust of sectional control, their insistence on the organic conception of the state, their belief in the power of tradition and the ancient processes of government, their emphasis on national duties, and therefore on a fai'-sighted foreign policy. He says, "Our system of classes represents the effect of selection by the capacity to govern." And again, "Heredity is no Tory invention, but a scientific fact."

In any analysis of unseemly class prepon- 27 derance the honest student of English conditions has to qualify the downright statement. Thus the landed gentry have often exercised a personal care for their tenants and the village community that the modem hberal captain of industry has sometimes neglected to exercise toward his employees. But the land monopoly has prevented England from being self-supporting and from reheving the pressure on industry of an overcrowded labor supply. It has robbed her of a sturdy land-owning peasantry like the French, and has given her in their place a city-bred, undersized, intellectually feeble, morally infirm lower class.

The intellectuals of the public schools and of Oxford and Cambridge have supplied a poise and dignity to modern life that a mediocre democracy lacks. Their graduates have given honest leadership in the Government. Recently their young men have gone gallantly to a service from which there is no returning. But much of the defense for the rigid, medieval class system, in so far as it possesses an intellectual basis, has been supplied by public school and university men. They are living in the home of lost causes.

The belated Tory Church of England clergy have continued to be an ameliorating influence in their communities. Their sane manner of living, their personal kindliness, their patient absorption in the humble lives about them — all these make a contribution we overlook in our easy generalizations on the decayed church. And there are abounding elements inside the established church itself that are as liberal as any elements in modern life. That church still has wise leaders, like Dean Welldon of Manchester and a dozen others. The sacramental view of life has profound and permanent values for certain persons. But when all has been said, it remains true that the church, with its compromised theology, its indifference to social injustice, its ignorance of where the modern fight for righteousness is being waged, its land-holding, its taxation, its absence of intellectual force in seeking truth, has acted as a deterrent in the emancipation of the masses. A state religion has been a soporific, drugging the laborer to believe that his lot in life was a part of the scheme of things. As an institution the church, and as a body the clergy, have not sought equality for their communities. The present National