Delphi complete works of.., p.739
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 739
It almost seems as if the snakes of evil were only cast out in one direction to crawl in from another. Man’s fight against untruth never ends. Even if freedom of thought and liberty of belief are fully granted, they may be attacked again by the newer method, not of trying to compel people to believe, but of cheating them into believing. This is called propaganda, and is largely a name for old lies back in new forms. There is the same new difficulty, the economic liberty and the free competition — and the world that was to run itself once Adam Smith had set it spinning. There was so much on which its earlier prophets had not calculated, so much that they could not possibly foresee. There was, unseen, the question of the right of “property” and especially of property in land. Our great-grandfathers gave it little thought. In America, especially, land was so boundless that no one cared whether George Washington owned a hundred and fifty acres or a hundred and fifty thousand. There was plenty anyway. Similarly, the inheritance and the bequest of property seemed as natural as death itself. He who went away gave his goods to those he left behind. To many pious and well-to-do people such ideas about ownership and property and the sanctity of the owner’s dying wish, seemed part of the structure of social life, beyond man’s right to alter.
This notion of the sanctity of property clung especially to property in land. The idea existed in Britain and America. In Great Britain it worked increasing hardship — the enclosures, the dispossession of the Highland crofters, the Irish evictions. In America, as said, for a long time it made little difference since land was plenty. But circumstances presently showed it otherwise. There came a day when all the free land was gone. The landless man had lost his natural right to the soil. There came a day when the growth of great cities raised the selling value of land to ten or even a hundred times its earlier price; and this, very often, without effort or risk for its owner, who grew rich by doing nothing. The fierce light thrown upon such gains by Henry George in his book Progress and Poverty (1879) has altered our whole conception of the extent of the right of property in land.
We now see that ownership of land must be limited by a certain responsibility about its use. The owner can no longer “do what he wants with his own.” That depends on what he wants to do. If he means to leave his land idle and undeveloped, then the government may expropriate it for other uses. Nor has he the right to expect to get for himself the full increase in value that may come to his property because other people develop property near it. Some of this increase may reasonably be taken away by taxes.
In the same way a hundred years ago the rent of a house seemed a matter of an open bargain between landlord and tenant. Now we recognize that rents may be driven up by a sudden shortage of house room, beyond what is evidently fair and reasonable. In such cases government may well step in and dictate fair rents, as is being done at the time of this writing in various military centres in Canada. In other words, there is no liberty in a forced market and no justice in forced and accidental gain. Liberty still remains within the framework of the golden rule that no one’s liberty must be maintained at the expense of others. But there is a long distance, indeed an open gulf, between this regulation of property in a free state and its obliteration by a despotism.
A similar inference runs through and must run through our whole industrial structure. The particular cases of its application are beyond the scope of the present discussion. Whether this or that particular “new deal” is justifiable is a matter of the special applications of a principle, not of the principle itself. In our day “free competition” cannot possibly mean what it meant in the days of John Stuart Mill. Mass industry has brought with it opportunities for sheer mass to crush out competition by its dead weight and on its wreck to raise up iniquity. “Unfair competition,” as recognized and applied by the courts of the United States, covers a multitude of cases of which Adam Smith in his whole twelve years could never dream, which even Mill could only have seen in a sort of nightmare.
Similarly, “monopoly” plays no particular part in Adam Smith’s book. Even with Mill monopoly is only the odd case and a monopoly price a thing to be explained and done with as a sort of curiosity. Mill speaks, for example, of the price of a “musical box” in the wilds of Lake Superior. This contrivance, a remote ancestor of the gramophone, was wound up to tinkle little tunes, and presumably a lonely trapper of the North might give anything he had for it, irrespective of what it cost the maker. Mill notices it and passes on. But if he had lived to discuss fifty years later the price of a gramophone in Winnipeg, that would have been different. What with the overhead costs, with joint production, with the fluttering clouds of advertising cost and the bed rock of initial investment, Mill would be greatly put to it to find what his own cherished “cost of production” really was. This thread-guide through his labyrinth would have suddenly branched into a dozen filaments running back into the maze.
But here again, however complicated the circumstances may be, the general idea of liberty under a free government is plain enough. We may have to alter the rules of the game itself. We may force fair trade practices and decent wages through our freely elected Congresses and legislatures and parliaments as in the Fair Labour Standards Act, the Wagner Act, and the Social Security Act, and in the statutes now enforcing fair rents in certain areas of Great Britain. But the individual is still free to pursue his own interests when they are in harmony with the interests of the rest of society.
But yet after all, and with it all, and when all is said about the unforeseen tendencies of democracy, the imperfections of liberty and the shortcomings of popular government left no pause in which to realize how great has been the achievement of liberty and democracy in the last century and a half of history.
We may take first the spread of public education, free or almost so, as perhaps the greatest achievement of modern democracy. In the illiterate, civilized world of two centuries ago — most of it was illiterate — the mass of the people were imprisoned in their own ignorance. To-day, where democracy rules, practically all can read and write, have easy access to books, and enter the enchanted garden of thought and fancy that lies within their pages.
In the English-speaking world Scotland led the way in the public education of its people. Even before the Reformation a Scottish statute (James IV., 1494) required all freeholders of substance to send their heirs to school until they had “perfect Latin.” School teachers can estimate how long our boys of to-day would remain at school on these terms. The Reformation carried the written word to the Scottish people. The Church Assembly enjoined the teaching of the “first rudiments” in every parish. An Act of (the Scottish) Parliament (1696) carried this provision into general effect.
Even before this the Puritan colony of Massachusetts had given the English-speaking world a lead with its first compulsory education laws of 1642 and 1648. The system of free, compulsory education spread throughout the United States. The migrating Loyalists carried it to British North America. The “little red school house” took its place among the great, formative institutions of this continent. The latest statistics available show over 20,000,000 children in the public schools of the United States, over 2,000,000 in those of Canada. The chorus of their uplifted voices comes to us in the pauses of our noise and conflict, as an undertone of our civilization.
In England public elementary education was slower in coming. A hundred years ago a large part of the population was still illiterate. We are told on good authority that at the time of the accession of Queen Victoria inertia and class prejudice had long delayed action. The claims of the Established Church blocked the way. Not until the School Act of 1870 was there a general public education carried on by the state. Ample amends have been made. The elementary school population in England stood, before the outbreak of the war, at over 5,000,000.
Nor has the democratic free school limited itself to supplying the “first rudiments.” With the care of the mind has gone that of the body, with health clinics and dental clinics; the promotion of recreation; the provision of free school books; in places the provision of school meals. Not all of these things everywhere; but some here and many there, and some day all of them everywhere. For surely here is the starting-point for a better organized world; the children first; what we do in the schools towards general welfare as a general charge, points the way, excites a quicker sympathy.
Public education has not stopped at the elementary school. It carries on to the state university and state schools of graduate education and research. The United States at the present time has an enrolment of over 6,000,000 students in secondary public schools. There are about 700,000 students attending state colleges and universities, matched by nearly as many in private (that is endowed) institutions. But the existence of the great endowed colleges side by side with state universities only represents a useful rivalry, each type able to do things that the other cannot do, and an incentive and opportunity for private wealth to supplement public generosity towards what is, quite rightly, an insatiable demand. The same situation holds in Canada, with state education (provincial universities) covering more of the field. In England the endowed colleges, ancient or recent, still lead, but state secondary schools (just before the war) had some 470,000 pupils as against the 400,000 in the so-called “public” schools not supported by the state. There were, in addition, over 1,300,000 in state vocational schools. In Scotland government secondary schools had 156,000 pupils as against 14,000 in the private schools.
With education has come the public library, democracy’s gift of books to its people. In England in the days just before printing, Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, famous as a patron of learning, had a library of some six hundred books — in his day a very treasure house. Given to Oxford, but broken up at the Reformation, Duke Humphrey’s library fills a page of history. But to-day in any American or Canadian town any boy or girl with access to the Free Library on Main Street holds treasures vastly greater. Nor let any one interrupt to say that to-day Duke Humphrey’s books would be “priceless.” They would; so would his bones. I am here counting books as living thought, not as vellum and dust.
Libraries began long before democracy with the cathedral and church libraries of Great Britain — at Canterbury under Augustine in Saxon times. With these were the old lawyers’ libraries (that of the Inner Temple, 1540) and those of the colleges of learned societies. The people’s libraries owed much to the Mechanics’ Institutes of the nineteenth century. A general Act of Parliament for the creation of public libraries was passed in 1850. In colonial America there were private libraries such as that of Cotton Mather in Boston. Benjamin Franklin planned the first subscription library (1731). The oldest real public library (paid for by the people’s taxes) was that of the town library of Salisbury, Connecticut, of 1803. But after the middle of the century public libraries increased and multiplied alongside of endowed libraries (the Astor, the Lenox, the Carnegie Libraries) open to the public. Statistics show 6000 public libraries now in the United States and a growing number in Canada.
Take next what is called “Housing,” an old word put to a new use to mean supplying decent houses for the industrial classes. One recalls, as already discussed, the aspect of the slums of a hundred years ago, or even those of to-day. The economic basis of the problem is simple enough. Pioneers on the land in a new country can own their own houses by making them. Industrial workers in cities can’t, or rather the great mass of them could not, till yesterday. The initial cost was greater than artisan savings could ever overcome. They must take what they could get, and pay for it in rent. Hence the emergence of landlords’ gain, and, still worse, of the unearned increment of rising ground value. Worst of all was the plight of the people without work, or with only casual work, who could buy food and fight starvation, but must take a chance on shelter. Families must crowd into one room. Those who could not sleep above ground must sleep in cellars. And even here, from the foulest bedroom, from the rottenest cellar, landlord’s gain must take its toll, ground values exhale from the filthiest slum an unearned increment of fortune, and wealth, often of the wealthiest, draw its luxuries from the misery of the poor. Strange that civilized humanity, for generations past, was too absorbed in needless hates and vain ambitions to have time to burn with indignation at such a sin.
“Housing” is a very simple idea. It means just this; the poorer people can’t build their own houses. Very good; we’ll build them for them, or if not the whole house, a part of it. Building under cost with the public purse to pay the difference, the public credit and large scale work to cut the cost itself, it’s just as simple as that.
Build a house — and here steps in humanitarianism, that warm human quality that dissolves the cold impossibilities of the economist. Build a house — then let every house have sunlight — yes, and a bath — right! and three bedrooms, one for father and mother, one for the boys and one for the girls — good — and a “living-room” — some other place than the kitchen to sit around in — yes, and a “hall” to enter by, don’t have them fall in off the street. Then as the neat little house rises to the mind’s eye, clean with stucco and half-timber, Tudor style — but better than Tudor ever saw — an angel whispers in the builder’s ear, “Wait a minute, what about a bit of a garden?” Set it back ten feet from the street — a little ten-foot garden all ablaze with flowers — have you any notion of the magic of it?
He who cannot enthuse over this is dead indeed. And we could have had it long ago, and can have it still. If we can pay in America and Britain 20 per cent., 30 per cent., 50 per cent, of our incomes to fight iniquity in arms, we could equally well spend it for human welfare in peace. But the odd fact is that we wouldn’t need to. It is a hard economic fact that to sweep clean the central slums in the heart of a city, and rebuild dwellings — not single houses, these, but model apartments in tiers with courtyards, enclosed, Spanish style, with the backs turned to the street and their faces to the enclosed sunlit gardens, where the children play — it is a fact, I say, that this would cost economically — what do you think? Nothing. All the labour and time expended would be less than the labour and time saved — in more efficient work and health. And financially it would cost — less than nothing; it would pay.
Public housing, as described, did not begin in Great Britain in earnest till after the Great War, with the Housing Act of 1919. Anything done before that was mainly by private and charitable enterprise, or in the Model Towns of public-spirited companies. The Act of 1919 called on the Local Authorities to plan and build working-class houses and rent them below cost, the central government making good the difference. Under the revised Act of 1923 the government paid a fixed sum (£6 per house per year) and the Local Authorities took the risk of a deficit. Provision was also made for condemning slum areas and demolishing slum houses at the government’s expense. Under these acts before the second World War broke out, 3,500,000 new houses were built in England and Wales, an addition of 45 per cent. to those existing. There were demolished 169,000 houses, and a population of 800,000 removed from slums to better homes.
Oddly enough it was perhaps a false start. The cost, national and local, of rehousing the people in towns was at the rate of £127 for each person rehoused. But much cheaper, much healthier it would be to “decentralize” them, factories and all, into the country with ample air and play room. The “housing” part of this would cost only about one-fifth of the town plan (£100 per person); the difference could go to moving the factories. The strange destiny is that the war and the German bombs are decentralizing factory life, and making a new beginning where peace failed.
The question of housing was, very naturally, later in coming to the United States than to Britain. Yet even in America the growth of seaports and industrial cities — as especially in New York in the period 1812-62 — had brought the problems of slum areas, crowded tenements and epidemic disease. Apart from sanitary measures, water supply, etc., and apart from private action, no general control of housing appears until the New York Tenement House Law of 1867. This was followed by similar legislation in the industrial states containing large cities (Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Illinois, etc.) regulating city house building, but mainly of a negative and preventive character, and not giving aid to the building of better houses.
After the Great War housing difficulties became acute both by shortage of houses and by lack of decent accommodation. This led to action by the Federal Government to supplement the operation of state tenement laws and of the many Housing Associations. The Public Works Housing Division carried out a programme of experimental house building with fifty-two trial projects in twenty-three states. The United States Housing Act of 1937 embodies the first national housing policy. It authorizes the loan of money to state enterprises, up to 90 per cent. of cost. By 1940-41, thirty-seven states were co-operating in this plan, and about 190,000 dwellings were provided for and loans made available up to about $770,000,000.
