THE SOCIALIST PROPOSALS.
IT is a little difficult to discuss anything with the Social Democratic Federation. Their leaders not only employ the style of the " authoritative " democrats of the Continent, and talk as dogmatically as if their views were revealed to them from on high, but they invariably wind up with some threat or other of employing physical force ; and that terminates argument. Avowed Terrorists are enemies of society, and to argue with them is to recognise implicitly their right to threaten. It is, however, the English custpm to argue as long as possible, and in a recent statement of Socialist ideas put forward by Mr. Hyndman, there is a concession which renders argument of some use. While maintaining that there can be no permanent cure for poverty except the control of the means of profit-making by the industrials— that is, in fact, the transfer of all capital and all work to a State controlled by workmen—he admits that less drastic means may be employed to meet accidental and temporary destitution. Among such means he specifies three,—the grant
of heavy work to men, and light work to women, out of employ, on fall wages to be paid by the State, which also is to divide among them any profit resulting from their labour ; secondly, a law fixing a minimum of wages for men, below which nobody shall work, and which shall be paid for a shortened day of labour ; and thirdly, a statute prohibiting the payment of women at a lower rate than men for doing the same kind of work. These are large propositions, and two of them involve that element of tyranny so often to be observed in Socialist proposals ; but still, they are intelligible, and not outside the region of discussion. Let us look at them quietly and dis- passionately.
1. There is no moral objection whatever to giving relief in work, instead of in money or food, the only objection being one of expediency ; but then, expediency weighs heavily against the proposal. If the State offers profitable work, it displaces independent labour; and if the work is equally good, pauperises exactly as many as it relieves. Suppose, for example, that the making of all soldiers' clothes is assigned to tailors out of employ, then the State dismisses exactly as many tailors who are in employ ; and where, on the Socialist principle, is the gain of that ? That is the result, supposing the work done to be equally effective ; but as a matter of fact, unless " relieved " workers are controlled by military discipline, or by prison discipline, they will not do equal work. They have no motive for doing it, for bad workers and good are paid equally, and the workers cannot be turned out to starve. Experience shows that, except under special circumstances, such work is a mere excuse for taking alms, which may just as well be given directly, and the receivers left free to seek the work which they like best, and to which they can adjust themselves far better than the State can adjust them. If, indeed, work can be found which would not be done under ordinary circumstances, yet wants doing, and if means can be devised for making the work efficient, the experiment would be feasible ; but the Socialists have suggested no such work yet, and probably intend that each class of workmen should be employed in their own trade. That inevitably involves either the expulsion of as many of their rivals, the employed workmen, or the transfer of the whole business to the State, which, besides giving full wages, is to divide all profits, and thus will gradually attract all workers, which might invblve a result the Socialists do not consider,—a heavy increase in taxation, which must ultimately fall on the whole people. Suppose the cost all thrown upon the Income-tax, still the wages fund would be proportionally diminished, and either the number of the employed or their wages proportionally reduced. The State has no Fortunatus's purse out of which to draw wealth ; nor could it take it from the rich, even if it had the moral right to do so, without diminishing their power of employing independent work. The plan has been repeatedly tried, and has only succeeded once,—during the Lan- cashire cotton-famine, when a whole community, being thrown out of work at once, was kept alive for a time mainly by road- making. We should not deny that if the able-bodied un- employed consented to the experiment, a great and separate work like the reclamation of the Wash, and its conversion into a new county, might be attempted and kept going for years, and so might a huge work like the conversion of the Avon into a source of electric energy ; but the task would be excessively costly, might cost much life, and would be most unpalatable to a majority of those employed on it.
2. A legal minimum for wages is simply impossible. Either the work, proving unprofitable at the wages, would cease to be done, as has happened in several small departments of in- dustry ; or it would be done abroad, as, for example, has happened in part with the trade in cheap house-fittings ; or workers and employers would combine to defeat the law. The practical result would probably be the latter, for as it happens, the world enjoys full experience on the subject. For centuries powerful Governments have endeavoured by legislation to limit the rate of interest to be paid for money, which is, in another department, precisely the same experiment, and they have invariably failed, the borrower paying market rate in the shape of an addition to the money nominally lent. Mr. Hyndman may say that the workman can be forbidden to take the lower rate ; but in practice he will take it if he needs it, as all Trades Unions know ; and the law, as against the wants of a great trade, say tailoring, would become a dead-letter. Moreover, and this argument will appeal to the majority, though not to the Socialists, the State, in passing such a law, would entirely exceed its rights. Liberty within the moral law is not a privilege, but a right,
and the majority have no more right to compel the minority to abstain from working if they wish to work, than they have to compel Mr. Hyndman to work when he wishes to be idle. Indeed, they have less right, for the right of the community to make a man produce something in return for the protection he receives does exist, and is only not used because there is no necessity for it, and because everybody compromises for the obligation by payment of taxes. In a besieged city, every one has often been compelled to work, and such compul- sion may be perfectly right. A minimum of wages cannot be fixed, and though a maximum day could be, it would probably be found inexpedient. We have, we confess, a lurking sympathy with the idea, so ably defended by Mr. E. Chadwick in his papers on education, that there is a point definable in time beyond which work is infructuous, and that the whole community would lose little by a shorter day ; but the time varies with every trade and every change of season, and is much better settled by the action of Trades Unions, which have in E❑gland been upon this point wonderfully successful. German hours, as described by the official reporter in the Economist of a fortnight since, would seem to our people unendurably oppressive.
3. We do not quite understand whether Mr. Hyndman makes his third proposal in the interests of women or of men. If in those of women, it is a hideous blunder. A law compelling every one to pay women as much as men for the same work would instantly throw the working women of London out of employ, and would, we have no manner of doubt, produce a genuine and most horrible insurrection. The women are employed because they are cheaper, and for no other reason. They cannot work like the men, even when the work is sewing cloth, and they would speedily be superseded, either by men, or in some instances, by machinery. This is so true, even in the one department, washing, in which women have a monopoly, that the poorer laundresses have to struggle desperately to keep men out of the work, and do, we believe, keep up a sort of Trade-Union protest against the employment of their rivals. If, however, the proposal is made in the interests of men—as is probable, all workmen objecting to female competition—it is intelligible. The withdrawal of women's competition would, of course, raise men's wages and increase their supply of work, and we are not pre- pared to say that ultimately, many years hence, the result would prove injurious. We can conceive that a society in which women worked only in the household would be a happier society, and one much more beneficial to children, than the present society. But Parliament, if it adopted Mr. Hyndman's proposal, would postpone the present to the future with a vengeance. It would cause, for one generation at least, an amount of ghastly misery and sexual demoralisation from which the imagination of the most cold-blooded fanatic might recoil, and would, moreover, though Mr. Hyndman would care little for that, strike a fatal blow at the first principles of human liberty. What earthly right has a man to say to a woman, " Thou shalt not work I" yet in demanding for her equal pay, that is what he does say, and in the majority of cases does mean, too. We can see no more hope in Mr. Hyndman's direct proposals than in the vague threats by which they are accompanied. Both will disturb industry, without in the least improving the condition of the industrious.
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