THE RIGHT TO WORK BILL. T HERE are many astonishing things - about
the Parlia- mentary Socialists, but perhaps the most astonishing thing of all is the manner in which—whether through ignorance or deliberately we will not now enquire— they misrepresent the views of their opponents. A capital example of this misunderstanding or misrepre- sentation is to be found in the speech of Mr. Lansbury, the Socialist leader, in the debate on the Right to Work Bill. Mr. Lansbury spoke as if he and his friends had a monopoly of good intentions and patriotic feelings in regard to the poorer classes of the community, and especially as to those who are hungry and unemployed. He did not merely profess to be alone in possession of the secret of how to solve the economic ills of Society, but talked as if his party were alone anxious to remedy those evils. As he possesses or feigns such an attitude, let us tell him that there are plenty of those who disagree with his nostrums who are quite as prepared as he is to declare that " the bread-and-butter question of millions of his fellow citizens was of infinitely greater importance than the Con- stitutional question." Who can doubt it—whoever has doubted it? No one out of a lunatic asylum would bother about the Constitutional question in comparison with solving the problem of destitution and of putting a pullet in every man's pot. Even if the price of " getting rid of the weight of poverty, destitution, and misery here in our very midst" were the loss of Empire, we would pay it. Does Mr. Lansbury really believe that people maintain what he so crudely calls "dreams of domination" or "the shibboleths of Free Trade" out of an abstract love for them and not on their merits, or that we who happen to desire both the main- tenance of the Empire and the maintenance of Free Trade dislike and oppose what he calls " the more excellent doctrine that teaches men that they are all social beings, interdependent one upon another, and that Society should be organised from top to bottom so as to bring to every man, woman, and child the opportunity of living full, free, happy lives?" Of course, Society ought to be so organised. That is the ideal of all of us, and that is the ideal for which we are working quite as keenly as the Socialists.
We want the restoration of the patient to health just as much as Mr. Lansbury does; nay, we want it more, and can prove that we want it more because we are not willing to feed the sick man with what Mr. Burns—unconsciously following Dr. Chalmers—calls poisonous opiates. The nation is out of health, and we see men proposing a quack remedy which has been advertised with all the industrious sophistries which are always associated with patent medi- cines and infallible " cure-alls." The honest doctor has before him a difficult and ungrateful task. He is not only obliged to declare that the quack remedy will greatly aggra- vate instead of curing the disease, but also has, as a rule, to confess that he has himself no " get-well-quick " medicine to offer—nothing which will produce a half cure with one bottle and an absolutely certain cure with two. He is obliged to admit that his remedy is slow in its operation, that the patient who takes it must expect to continue feeling pain and suffering for a considerable time longer, and that only through self-denial and the patient observation of a strict and disagreeable regi- men can complete health be regained. In the same way we who expose the quackeries of Socialism and its " get-well-quick " remedies labour under the disadvantage of having to tell the country that we have not the power to cure it with two bottles in twenty-four hours. Our treatment will not only take long to produce a cure, but will involve self- sacrifice and the tiresome application of self-restraint, thrift, and prudence. We are in the position in which Cordelia found herself when she had to compete with Regan and Goneril. We cannot hope to rival them in fulsome professions of love and devotion to King Demos. We have to admit that our medicines make no claim to do what our opponents assert that theirs will do. We can merely adopt the unsensational and unsympathetic role of those who point out that the promised remedy so much longed for by the patient in pain will prove worse than the disease. We dare not even promise a complete zure in the future. All we can say with absolute certainty is that we will do nothing to make the patient worse. Yet, handicapped as we are, we shall in the end beat the quacks as the honest physician always beats them. The patient may stray away from us for a time and try the charlatan's purple powders and pink purifiers, greatly to his harm and loss. In the end, however, he will come back to the advocates of common-sense.
We have noted that the opponents of Socialism, whether right or wrong, desire as keenly as Mr. Lansbury the welfare of the people. The question between us is not one of ends but of means. Anyone can have good aims; the problem is how to achieve them. Now the essential difference between us, on the one hand, and Mr. Lansbury and the Socialists on the other, is the question of whether we are to adopt as our foundation- stone the principle of freedom of exchange or the principle of State ownership and organisation. He and his friends believe, and, doubtless, however much they may misrepresent us, believe quite sincerely, that the abolition of destitution and misery can only be reached by rejecting the basis of free exchange and substituting that of the State ownership and organisation of all industries, and, with it, State compulsion in the matter of work. We, on the other hand, hold that, though a miserable semi- savage state may conceivably be organised on the principle of State ownership and State compulsion, no true material and industrial progress is possible on such a basis. The problem at bottom is the problem of incentive. Under a Socialistic system there will, in our opinion, be an insufficient incentive. The unproductive and unprolific character of Government work—the Government stroke, as Londoners have called the action of the man in State employment—affords the proof of our proposition. In welling. for the State there may be no " The Devil take the hindmost," but there is, certainly, no "The race is to the swift." Under a system of free exchange, however, the incentive to work reaches its greatest height.
Exchange is an act so simple, so universal, that we are apt to disregard its wonder-working nature. Yet to this harmless, necessary act is due our whole material progress. A man has only to understand the true nature of exchange to obtain in the region of economics something which is equivalent to " conversion " in the region of religion. Exchange is not merely the foundation stone of wealth. On its moral side it is an act of co-operation, or, as Bastiat so well called it, " a union of forces." It is not an act in which one side profits and the other loses. It is a mutual benefit, a double blessing, a reciprocal act of mercy. It blesses him that buys and him that sells. And by the device under which, instead of barter, a man buys and sells for money, he obtains the maximum of choice, and thereby the maximum of incentive to his work. He who sells his quarter of wheat for 28s., or whatever may be the price of the day, has, through payment in money, not in kind, a world of choice before him as to what to take for his exchange. Thus he is given an incentive to work and to produce to which none other is comparable. But perhaps it will be said, Why trouble so much about i this incentive to work ? Why is it necessary to find something which will spur a man on to get the maximum of work out of himself and to give the stroke of individual effort rather than " the Government stroke " ? The uiswer is patent : Man's desires are progressive. He .s perpetually planning and needing new things and more things. It is his habit, or, if you will, his fate. But if this imperative enquiry after, and desire for, more bings, better things and newer things, is to be ful- illed, as we all want it to be fulfilled, it follows that shat we need is abundance. But abundance, as Bastiat pointed out long ago, can never be reached through the artificial creation of scarcity. You may rightly and properly stop boy labour on moral or sanitary grounds, and we would most emphatically stop some of it on those grounds ; but if you try to stop it, as Mr. Lansbury wishes, in the interests of the starving poor and to make work, you are seeking abundance through an artificially pro- duced scarcity. It is, indeed, as important to remember that abundance, which is what the world never c,eas2s wanting on the material side, can never be obtained through scarcity, as it is to remember that exchange is always a union of forces, and not an act of pillage. Let us say once more that we who oppose Socialism desire as much as any Socialist the reduction of human misery. We know, however, that it can never be obtained by weakening human energy and by diminishing exchanges. If men are to have more, there must be more to go round, and that more will only be obtained by an increase in the efficiency of the workers. As Chalmers saw and insisted, poverty is, in the last resort, a moral evil, and requires a moral treatment. It is from the greater efficiency of the workers and from an increase in wealth that we shall improve the general condition of the people. What is wanted is not less capital—that is, less wealth— but more. The workman's ideal of two jobs looking for one man is a perfectly sound economic ideal, and it is one which we long to see accomplished. But remember it can • only be accomplished by the accumulation of wealth. If the -workers would only understand that every accumulation of capital tended to put capital more at their mercy in the matter of hiring, they would become the most ardent desirers of such accumulations. Let them only be persuaded to spend a little less on unnecessary things, to save a little more, and to put a little more energy into their work, and the question of unemployment would very soon solve itself. But this is, of course, in the end. a question of character, and unfortunately we are for ever, as a State, destroy- ing rather than building up character and indepen- dence in the workers. In the day we weave the web in education, and at night undo it by pauperising and character-wrecking legislation. When we put premiums broadcast on slackness, thriftlessness, and economic folly, how can we expect not to find a large and flourishing crop of these qualities? We shall only get a better state of things in this country if we have better citizens, and we shall only get better citizens by making it unpleasant and unprofitable to be a bad citizen, and pleasant and profitable to be a good citizen. We fully admit, with Mr. Lansbury, that there remains ove r the problem of the idle and luxurious rich, but that pro- blem would soon cure itself if the workers were more efficient, more thrifty, and more self-respecting. It is the demoralisation of the labourer, caused largely by socialistic legislation, which gives the idle rich man his opportunity. The cynical capitalist has nothing to fear from socialistic legislation. It is that in the last resort which gives him a high rate of interest for his money and puts the employed at his mercy.
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