Delphi complete works of.., p.789
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 789
Here then we have a gathering protest against things as they are arising out of a vision seen in the lurid light of war, of things as they might be. It seems self-evident that man’s industrial power, so colossal for destruction, should easily be sufficient to meet the reasonable and decent wants of decent people. To many of us, in and out of parties, this gathering protest takes on all the appeal of a great crusade. Nothing else but such a victory over poverty and want can ever atone for the martyrdoms of war. Nothing else can ever make the world seem straight.
At the present moment we like to formulate all that we attempt in charters, documents and points. Hence this new movement for social betterment has already been formulated in outline by the great labour parties, by peoples’ congresses, by a hundred individual reformers. It has never been stated in broader or more sympathetic outline than in the Six Points laid down by the Archbishop of Canterbury, with a human kindliness that recalls the Sermon on the Mount. The points are aimed, as they should be, at the goal: they disregard the means; they refuse to consider money; they know no such word as impossible. Here they follow: —
(1) Every child should find itself a member of a family housed with decency and dignity, so that it may grow up in a happy fellowship, unspoiled by underfeeding or overcrowding, by dirty or drab surroundings, or by mechanical monotony in environment.
(2) Every child should have the opportunity of an education till years of maturity. This education should be inspired by faith in God and find its focus in worship.
(3) Every citizen should be secure in possession of such income as will enable him to maintain a home and bring up children in such condition as described in paragraph 1.
(4) Every citizen should have a voice in business or industry which is carried on by means of his labour, and the satisfaction of knowing that his labour is directed to the well-being of the community.
(5) After the war, every citizen should have sufficient daily leisure, with two days of rest in seven, and an annual holiday with pay, to enable him to enjoy a full personal life.
(6) Every citizen should have assured liberty in the forms of freedom of worship, of speech, of assembly and of association for special purposes.
Incidentally I may say that of all the Archbishop’s clauses the one that strikes me as having an overwhelming appeal is the plea for two days of rest and holiday every week. This would transform our working life. To many millions of workers it would restore the lost world of their schooldays, when the break of Saturday and Sunday made up for all the rest of the week. “Let me go fishing on Saturday and loaf all Sunday,” says such a one, “and you may have all the rest.” In pure theory this item of social reform is the easiest. The world’s work of five days would easily satisfy the world’s needs of seven, and even if the world worked seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, it could never satisfy the world’s caprices. But in reality this reform is the hardest. It is one of the things easy to do if everybody does it, impossible to do one at a time. It belongs with phonetic spelling, universal disarmament and other such dreams. Yet sometimes dreams at last come true.
This broad platform of what we are beginning to call social security corresponds closely to the recommendations of the (Sir William) Beveridge Report prepared for the British Government and to the semi-official reports made under the auspices of our Dominion Government. Still more notable is the endorsation of this general idea of the responsibility of all for the welfare of each as given in the “Second Bill of Rights,” recently presented to Congress by the President of the United States. The first “bill of rights,” commonly so called, is found in the first ten Amendments appended en bloc in 1789 to the Constitution of the United States of 1789. These guarantee political freedom, the right of free speech, free assembly, freedom from arbitrary government, from illegal arrest, from cruel or unusual punishment. The clauses bear the stamp of their epoch in being negative, not positive: They forbid ill-treatment of the citizen but, of themselves, they neither feed nor clothe nor shelter him. He is still free to starve. A hundred years has taught us that liberty bakes no bread. The milestone of progress is marked with this change from the negative obligation laid on the state to let people alone, all that was asked in the morning of political liberty, to the positive duty of the state to help people on their way, a lesson learned not in the first joy of the morning of hope but in the burden and heat of the day.
None of these platforms of social security count the cost: none of them explain, to use the simple business term, “where the money is to come from.” I think it well that they do not, for this indicated field of government expenditure seems to me the first charge on the list, taking precedence of everything else: and I am one among the many millions of people who think that these things can be done.
But unfortunately there are many people who calculate in what they call cold dollars and sense, as contrasted with warm philanthropy and say that no such security program is possible, that the available capital and income of the nation cannot cover it. They will tell us that the whole of our national wealth in Canada is only estimated at $25,000,000,000 (official statistics of 1933) with a corresponding income of $2,795,000,000 or 277 dollars a year for each of us. That of course includes the infants and the children. But even if we count only the gainful workers you find only an average income of 1,100 dollars to support a household of four. No one would get far on that in the way of extravagance.
Moreover, so the same calculators argue, it wouldn’t help much if we spread round the super-incomes of the super-rich over the mass of the people. In one sense the incomes of the super-rich bulk large in the public eye. It is true that in the reckless days before the great slump of 1929 certain rich people of the Canadian metropolitan cities thought little of spending ten thousand dollars on a single party festivity. That looks a lot in the lump, but little when spread out thin. The top-stratum of 473 of our income tax payers show a combined income of $50,000,000. Spread that round among the rest of us and all we get is about four dollars a year each. Better let the rich keep it and we can have the fun of looking in through the windows at the party.
Let us add that our national debt has been increased by the Victory Loans till it now has gone beyond 6,000,000,000 dollars, in other words, more than a year and a half of our national income. Hence our average family wage-earner with about 1,200 dollars a year is in debt 2,000 dollars with no great chance apparently of ever getting out of it. Where is there room inside that, asks our critic, for the grandiose scheme of schools and colleges, leisure and holidays — all the cultivated decent life of the Archbishop’s new world?
Now personally I take but little stock in such an argument. I am convinced that calculation of economic efforts in terms of money-value gives an entirely misleading light. Such a calculation is vitiated everywhere by the fact that money values arise out of scarcity, that plenty of everything is worth nothing. We can never find out the best direction of human effort for the satisfaction of human wants by calculating how best to create money values. But the trouble is that this form of argument leads a great many people to say straight out that our gilded social security is impossible: that we must hark to the hard work (honest toil, they call it) of earlier days, to the self-respecting independence, the sturdy individualism — in other words to the long slow poverty that looks so ennobled in life’s retrospect, so dreary day by day.
Such a return is not possible. The world at large will not accept it and the very suggestion of a recourse to it only drives people to denounce the existing system under which we live and to lay at the door of private property and private enterprise our failure to enter a promised land already clearly in sight. What has happened shows us the failure — we will not say the fault — not only of our statesmen, our capitalists, our bankers, but of all of us who lived in the world as it was and acquiesced in it, and dulled our eyes to the sight of poverty, our ears to its complaint.
Before the outbreak of the war we had many thousands of men out of work and on relief, and thousands more tramping the streets begging for work, hating to sink to the level of cold charity.
I’m ashamed of that, aren’t you?
Before the present war the dole that we gave to a workman out of work was just enough, hardly more, to keep him and his family from actual starvation, actual death by cold — a few dollars a week.
We told them it was all we could afford, yet look what we can afford now, for the Germans, when we have to.
I’m ashamed of that, aren’t you?
In the days before the war, a man out of work could not find an acre of ground that he could dig. It was all property. In a country with millions of acres lying in the sun! He couldn’t find a tree to cut for firewood. In a country where the forests and woods extend to the towns themselves — all property!
. . . Is that right? People hungry within sight of food, cold within sight of fuel.
We have to take counsel then how best we can set things right using all that was good in the past, cutting out the wrong. Now such a discussion can only be of use if it is carried on without animosity, without prejudice, without any of that make-believe antagonism which seems to be a necessary evil of democracy. It is the weakness of our politics and parties, of our free speech and open discussion, that it leads us to pick up sides, swear ourselves in as Liberals or Conservatives or what not, and after that to carry on with only one ear and one eye — the other obstinately shut.
Parties, I admit, are necessary to the practical conduct of government in peace time. Without them we should just have a brawling chaos of individual opinion, a bedlam of cranks each outshouting the other. Parties at least secure unity and permit reasonably free government to be carried on, whereas if it were entirely free it would fall to pieces like an anarchist’s congress or a free-for-all debate in Ireland. Nor does it matter in times of pleasant peace, safe from any great national crisis, if party operation carries with it a certain spice of party humbug, and make-believe animosity and mimic denunciation of imaginary villainy pleasant as peace itself; What better fun than election time, with Grits and Tories denouncing one another? — one candidate compared to Machiavelli and the other to Judas Iscariot, and both doing business on Main Street.
It is strange how we have carried these mimic party animosities down the current of our Canadian politics . . .: life long “Grits” as inconvincible as life long “Tories”; men beyond argument and above correction.
For our present purpose, then, we have to start from the fact that we are all of us decent people — outside of the criminal classes and perhaps even inside them, except as to a man’s own specialty. We recall from one of W. S. Gilbert’s ballads the name of Good Robber Brown, who was “the kindest hearted man who ever cut a throat.” Outside of his specialty, he was all right. So are we all. At any rate I am convinced that the great mass of us are people who share in our degree a common love of our country with a certain common selfishness for ourselves. And in reality and on a large scale the other people are so few that they don’t count. If this were not so they would destroy us, as we have seen other countries destroyed.
So we will understand that a Conservative means a tremendously decent fellow, a little hipped, we admit, about the past, and not liking to change things. He’s got an idea, good fellow that he is, that he’d like things to go on just as they are. Thick in the head? Oh, no, not at all, how could you think that? firm, if you like, not thick.
Similarly, let’s understand or let’s pretend that a Liberal is another decent fellow, singularly level headed, clear minded; so much so that if he sees things not working properly he’s willing to change them. Why not? He has a fixed notion of moving forward, not tearing up the past by the roots but trimming the branches of the trees, and, remember, he’s a perfectly reasonable man, open to argument and conviction, unless you start by calling yourself a Conservative and him a Liberal. That coagulates his fluid mind into solid matter. Of course for any topic on which the Liberal party in parliament has already voted, the reason is all out of him.
Beside these two is the “Socialist,” whose very name for many people settles the case against him beyond argument. History confuses him with Nihilists, Anarchists, Terrorists — men wearing black masks and carrying dynamite bombs, taken straight out of the old Drury Lane melodrama of the 1880’s. The Socialist of our day has nothing to do with these people. Our typical socialist is an idealist. Does that mean a nut? No, certainly not. It means a man with a vision, who sees in his mind’s eye a re-made society where there is no more poverty and want, where the welfare of each becomes the welfare of all and the world becomes the beautiful garden that it might be. This is the vision that has haunted mankind down the ages, to be realized, if this earth denies it, somewhere when this earth is done. And to the socialist as to the eye of faith that removes mountains, it all seems so easy, so simple — nothing needed but the willing brotherhood of all.
How then can such decent people quarrel? How then can they let themselves be drawn collectively towards the brink of disaster by their very disagreement? The fundamental decency of all people — of all that we need to think of — is either a basic fact of society or else is all our labour vain, our talk idle. One recalls the refrain of the once popular London music-hall song, “He’s all right when you know him, but you got to know him fust”; or Mark Antony’s admission in regard to the assassins of Caesar, “So are they all, all honourable men.” And I don’t think that Antony said it in irony. It was the pity of it that appealed, that honourable men could fall so far apart.
So will we then in this discussion take our start from the fact that we are all honourable men: that a Social Creditor from Alberta or a member of the Bloc Populaire from Chicoutimi, P.Q. is all right when you know him and so is an Orangeman from Orangeville. We will agree that an old fashionable Tory from the most old-fashioned street in Toronto who hasn’t changed his opinion for a hundred years is as good as an old-line Grit who altered his only fifty years ago, or an up-and-doing Enthusiast who changes his opinion as easily as he changes his shirt, in fact easier. We are old good Canadians. Others need not read.
CHAPTER II PRIVATE ENTERPRISE
IN THIS AND the following chapter I propose to discuss private enterprise and state control. I will try to show that each of them is admirable in its place, disastrous when carried beyond it. Private enterprise has been the motive of man’s economic life ever since Adam was invited to leave the Garden of Eden and put it into operation. Overlaid by tyranny, pressed down into slavery, almost but never quite stifled out of existence by the lack of the liberty that is its life, it made its way down through the ages, a motive as indestructible as physical energy itself.
State control, on the other hand, is by descent, in part at least, the offspring, the outcome of what was once the overlordship essential in a barbarous age but tending to consolidate itself into an enslaving tyranny which forced the many to labour for the interest of the few and almost, but not quite, extinguished the freedom of private enterprise. But its form is so altered today as to obscure its origin. Now in a complex age of power and machinery state control becomes the necessary setting inside which private initiative operates. Private enterprise is the power — the head of water, the voltage of electricity, the pressure of steam, the expansion of gas, in other words, the motive force; state control is the machine that directs and turns it to use. Neither can function of itself. Each is the complement of the other. Private enterprise, extended unchecked and free, means the enslavement of the weak by the strong. State control, expanded into all-round socialism, means the enslavement of the individual by the state, followed by the seizure of the state by organized gangs of bosses. The world has seen both these things — the by-gone slavery of the cotton mills of Lancashire of a hundred years ago as a product of unregulated enterprise and the enslavement of half Europe today by the seizure of State control by organized brute force.
But in Canada our discussion of these things at the moment is all distorted and prejudiced by the assumption that private enterprise and state control are contradictory terms and still more by the new obloquy which is being attached to the term “private enterprise.” No name is too bad for it. It is labelled the “Capitalist System,” by a queer irony that thus accuses every owner of a village house and garden as a capitalist, and the “profits system,” as if every decent farmer with a bag of wheat to sell, every apostolic fisherman with a net of white fish for the local market were a man caught in sin. “Private enterprise” now lies so low that like Caesar’s body, none do it reverence. People are forgetting that this that they deride, this liberty to work for oneself in one’s own way — this was, not so long ago, the new light of the world. This was the great freedom that gave to the world the democracy of the United States, that gave to Great Britain its greatest achievements and its grandest names and to the British Empire that outer ring of free Dominions that buttress its central strength. Private enterprise! Why, this is Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, this is Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson. It did not fulfil to completion all those earliest hopes that accompanied its inception. It did not, and we know now that it never could, in and of itself, abolish poverty and establish social justice. But with all its failures this doctrine, this gospel of individual liberty and private rights is the greatest boon, in the material sense, that ever came on earth.
Turn back the pages of history. Nor let anyone think in his impatience to be forthwith at argument that history is out of place. It is not possible to understand the world of today without a knowledge of the world of yesterday from which it sprang. The main motives of social action belong as well to the past as to the present.
