Utopia of Usurers — Sectiion 10

THE EMPIRE OF THE IGNORANT

That anarchic future which the more timid Tories professed to fear has already fallen upon us.

We are ruled by ignorant people.

But the most ignorant people in modern Britain are to be found in the upper class, the middle class, and especially the upper middle class.

I do not say it with the smallest petulance or even distaste; these classes are often really beneficent in their breeding or their hospitality, or their humanity to animals.

There is still no better company than the young at the two Universities, or the best of the old in the Army or some of the other services.

Also, of course, there are exceptions in the matter of learning; real scholars like Professor Gilbert Murray or Professor Phillimore are not ignorant, though they _are_ gentlemen.

But when one looks up at any mass of the wealthier and more powerful classes, at the Grand Stand at Epsom, at the windows of Park-lane, at the people at a full-dress debate or a fashionable wedding, we shall be safe in saying that they are, for the most part, the most ill-taught, or untaught, creatures in these islands.

Literally Illiterate It is indeed their feeble boast that they are not literally illiterate.

They are always saying the ancient barons could not sign their own names--for they know less of history perhaps than of anything else.

The modern barons, however, can sign their own names--or someone else’s for a change.

They can sign their own names; and that is about all they can do.

They cannot face a fact, or follow an argument, or feel a tradition;

but, least of all, can they, upon any persuasion, read through a plain impartial book, English or foreign, that is not specially written to soothe their panic or to please their pride.

Looking up at these seats of the mighty I can only say, with something of despair, what Robert Lowe said of the enfranchised workmen: “We must educate our masters.

” I do not mean this as paradoxical, or even as symbolical; it is simply tame and true.

The modern English rich know nothing about things, not even about the things to which they appeal.

Compared with them, the poor are pretty sure to get some enlightenment, even if they cannot get liberty; they must at least be technical.

An old apprentice learnt a trade, even if his master came like any Turk and banged him most severely.

The old housewife knew which side her bread was buttered, even if it were so thin as to be almost imperceptible.

The old sailor knew the ropes; even if he knew the rope’s end.

Consequently, when any of these revolted, they were concerned with things they knew, pains, practical impossibilities, or the personal record.

But They Know The apprentice cried “Clubs?

” and cracked his neighbours’ heads with the precision and fineness of touch which only manual craftsmanship can give.

The housewives who flatly refused to cook the hot dinner knew how much or how little, cold meat there was in the house.

The sailor who defied discipline by mutinying at the Nore did not defy discipline in the sense of falling off the rigging or letting the water into the hold.

Similarly the modern proletariat, however little it may know, knows what it is talking about.

But the curious thing about the educated class is that exactly what it does not know is what it is talking about.

I mean that it is startlingly ignorant of those special things which it is supposed to invoke and keep inviolate.

The things that workmen invoke may be uglier, more acrid, more sordid; but they know all about them.

They know enough arithmetic to know that prices have risen; the kind Levantine gentleman is always there to make them fully understand the meaning of an interest sum; and the landlord will define Rent as rigidly as Ricardo.

The doctors can always tell them the Latin for an empty stomach; and when the poor man is treated for the time with some human respect (by the Coronet) it almost seems a pity he is not alive to hear how legally he died.

Against this bitter shrewdness and bleak realism in the suffering classes it is commonly supposed that the more leisured classes stand for certain legitimate ideas which also have their place in life; such as history, reverence, the love of the land.

Well, it might be no bad thing to have something, even if it were something narrow, that testified to the truths of religion or patriotism.

But such narrow things in the past have always at least known their own history; the bigot knew his catechism; the patriot knew his way home.

The astonishing thing about the modern rich is their real and sincere ignorance--especially of the things they like.

No!

Take the most topical case you can find in any drawing-room: Belfast.

Ulster is most assuredly a matter of history; and there is a sense in which Orange resistance is a matter of religion.

But go and ask any of the five hundred fluttering ladies at a garden party (who find Carson so splendid and Belfast so thrilling) what it is all about, when it began, where it came from, what it really maintains?

What was the history of Ulster?

What is the religion of Belfast?

Do any of them know where Ulstermen were in Grattan’s time; do any of them know what was the “Protestantism” that came from Scotland to that isle; could any of them tell what part of the old Catholic system it really denied?

It was generally something that the fluttering ladies find in their own Anglican churches every Sunday.

It were vain to ask them to state the doctrines of the Calvinist creed; they could not state the doctrines of their own creed.

It were vain to tell them to read the history of Ireland; they have never read the history of England.

It would matter as little that they do not know these things, as that I do not know German;

but then German is not the only thing I am supposed to know.

History and ritual are the only things aristocrats are supposed to know; and they don’t know them.

Smile and Smile I am not fed on turtle soup and Tokay because of my exquisite intimacy with the style and idiom of Heine and Richter.

The English governing class is fed on turtle soup and Tokay to represent the past, of which it is literally ignorant, as I am of German irregular verbs; and to represent the religious traditions of the State, when it does not know three words of theology, as I do not know three words of German.

This is the last insult offered by the proud to the humble.

They rule them by the smiling terror of an ancient secret.

They smile and smile;

but they have forgotten the secret.

THE SYMBOLISM OF KRUPP

The curious position of the Krupp firm in the awful story developing around us is not quite sufficiently grasped.

There is a kind of academic clarity of definition which does not see the proportions of things for which everything falls within a definition, and nothing ever breaks beyond it.

To this type of mind (which is valuable when set to its special and narrow work) there is no such thing as an exception that proves the rule.

If I vote for confiscating some usurer’s millions I am doing, they say, precisely what I should be doing if I took pennies out of a blind man’s hat.

They are both denials of the principle of private property, and are equally right and equally wrong, according to our view of that principle.

I should find a great many distinctions to draw in such a matter.

First, I should say that taking a usurer’s money by proper authority is not robbery, but recovery of stolen goods.

Second, I should say that even if there were no such thing as personal property, there would still be such a thing as personal dignity, and different modes of robbery would diminish it in very different ways.

Similarly, there is a truth, but only a half-truth, in the saying that all modern Powers alike rely on the Capitalist and make war on the lines of Capitalism.

It is true, and it is disgraceful.

But it is _not_ equally true and equally disgraceful.

It is not true that Montenegro is as much ruled by financiers as Prussia, just as it is not true that as many men in the Kaiserstrasse, in Berlin, wear long knives in their belts as wear them in the neighbourhood of the Black Mountain.

It is not true that every peasant from one of the old Russian communes is the immediate servant of a rich man, as is every employee of Mr. Rockefeller.

It is as false as the statement that no poor people in America can read or write.

There is an element of Capitalism in all modern countries, as there is an element of illiteracy in all modern countries.

There are some who think that the number of our fellow-citizens who can sign their names ought to comfort us for the extreme fewness of those who have anything in the bank to sign it for, but I am not one of these.

In any case, the position of Krupp has certain interesting aspects.

When we talk of Army contractors as among the base but active actualities of war, we commonly mean that while the contractor benefits by the war, the war, on the whole, rather suffers by the contractor.

We regard this unsoldierly middleman with disgust, or great anger, or contemptuous acquiescence, or commercial dread and silence, according to our personal position and character.

But we nowhere think of him as having anything to do with fighting in the final sense.

Those worthy and wealthy persons who employ women’s labour at a few shillings a week do not do it to obtain the best clothes for the soldiers, but to make a sufficient profit on the worst.

The only argument is whether such clothes are just good enough for the soldiers, or are too bad for anybody or anything.

We tolerate the contractor, or we do not tolerate him; but no one admires him especially, and certainly no one gives him any credit for any success in the war.

Confessedly or unconfessedly we knock his profits, not only off what goes to the taxpayer, but what goes to the soldier.

We know the Army will not fight any better, at least, because the clothes they wear were stitched by wretched women who could hardly see; or because their boots were made by harassed helots, who never had time to think.

In war-time it is very widely confessed that Capitalism is not a good way of ruling a patriotic or self-respecting people, and all sorts of other things, from strict State organisation to quite casual personal charity, are hastily substituted for it.

It is recognised that the “great employer,” nine times out of ten, is no more than the schoolboy or the page who pilfers tarts and sweets from the dishes as they go up and down.

How angry one is with him depends on temperament, on the stage of the dinner--also on the number of tarts.

Now here comes in the real and sinister significance of Krupps.

There are many capitalists in Europe as rich, as vulgar, as selfish, as rootedly opposed to any fellowship of the fortunate and unfortunate.

But there is no other capitalist who claims, or can pretend to claim, that he has very appreciably _helped_ the activities of his people in war.

I

will suppose that Lipton did not deserve the very severe criticisms made on his firm by Mr. Justice Darling; but, however blameless he was, nobody can suppose that British soldiers would charge better with the bayonet because they had some particular kind of groceries inside them.

But Krupp can make a plausible claim that the huge infernal machines to which his country owes nearly all of its successes could only have been produced under the equally infernal conditions of the modern factory and the urban and proletarian civilisation.

That is why the victory of Germany would be simply the victory of Krupp, and the victory of Krupp would be simply the victory of Capitalism.

There, and there alone, Capitalism would be able to point to something done successfully for a whole nation--done (as it would certainly maintain) better than small free States or natural democracies could have done it.

I confess I think the modern Germans morally second-rate, and I think that even war, when it is conducted most successfully by machinery, is second-rate war.

But this second-rate war will become not only the first but the only brand, if the cannon of Krupp should conquer; and, what is very much worse, it will be the only intelligent answer that any capitalist has yet given against our case that Capitalism is as wasteful and as weak as it is certainly wicked.

I do not fear any such finality, for I happen to believe in the kind of men who fight best with bayonets and whose fathers hammered their own pikes for the French Revolution.