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THE SERVILE STATE by H.BELLOC 
 
UNIFORM VOLUME 
 
 THE SOCIAL UNREST: ITS CAUSE 
 
 AND SOLUTION. BY J. RAMSAY 
 
 MACDONALD, M.P. 
 
THE SERVILE 
 STATE 
 
 By HILAIRE BELLOC 
 
 : . . . If we do not restore the Institution 
 
 of Property we cannot escape restoring 
 
 the Institution of Slavery ; there 
 
 is no third course." 
 
 TNFOULIS 
 
 London & Edinburgh 
 
 1913 
 
 ,!W 
 
E. S. P. HAYNES 
 
Published October 1912 
 Reprinted February 19 1 3 
 ,, October 191 3 
 
 PRINTED BY NEILL AND CO., LTD. EDINBURGH. 
 
PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION 
 
 WITH THE ISSUE OF A SECOND EDITION 
 of this book the author may perhaps be excused for 
 adding, by way of Preface, a few words upon the 
 thesis it maintains and the method through which 
 that thesis is treated. 
 
 It appears the more necessary to do so because a 
 careful comparison of the reviews and other expres- 
 sions of opinion which it has received convinces the 
 author that parts of his argument are liable to mis- 
 conception. Itwould be a pity to correct such miscon- 
 ception by any changes in a completed book ; a few 
 words set down here by way of Preface should be 
 sufficient for the purpose. 
 
 First: I would point out that the argument con- 
 tained in the book bears no relation to the common 
 accusation levelled against Socialists (that is, Col- 
 lectivists) that life in a Socialist State would be so 
 subject to regulation and order as to be unduly op- 
 pressive. With this common objection to the reform 
 advocated by Socialists I have nothing to do in this 
 book, nor can it touch my subject at any point. This 
 book does not discuss the Socialist State. Indeed it 
 is the very heart of my thesis that we are not, as a 
 fact, approaching Socialism at all.but a very different 
 state of society; to wit.a society in which the Capital- 
 ist class shall be even more powerful and far more 
 secure than it is at present: a society in which the pro- 
 letarian mass shall not suffer from particular regula- 
 vii 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 tions, oppressive or beneficent, but shall change their 
 status,lose their present legal freedom, and besubject 
 to compulsory labour. 
 
 Next, I would beg my readers to believe that I 
 have not attempted to set up this thesis as a warning 
 or as a piece of gloom. I say nowhere in the book 
 that the re-establishment of slavery would be a bad 
 thing as compared with our present insecurity, and 
 no one has a right to read such an opinion into this 
 book. Upon the contrary, I say clearly enough that 
 I think the tendency towards the re-establishment 
 of slavery is due to the very fact that the new condi- 
 tions may be found more tolerable than those obtain- 
 ing under Capitalism. Which state of society might 
 reasonably be preferred — the re-establishment of 
 slavery or the maintenance of Capitalism — would 
 make an ample subject for another book: but that 
 alternative does not concern this volume or the thesis 
 therein maintained. 
 
 Finally, I would beg such of my readers as are 
 Socialist by conviction not to misconceive my opin- 
 ion upon what their movement is effecting. The most 
 sincereand the best writeramong the English Social- 
 ists wrote of this book that the author had mistaken 
 the "Social Reform'' of the professional politicians 
 for Socialism, and that while this "Social Reform" 
 might be tending towards the re-establishment of 
 compulsory labour for the benefit of an owning class, 
 
 viii 
 
PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION 
 
 yet Socialism had no such intention or tendency. 
 
 Now I never made such an error. What I have said 
 in this book is that the object of the Socialist (a very 
 simple and clear matter — the putting of the means of 
 production into the hands of politicians to hold in 
 trust for the community) is not in practice being ap- 
 proached; that we are not, as a matter of fact, coming 
 nearer towards the collective ownership of the means 
 of production, but that we are rapidly coming nearer 
 to the establishment of compulsory labour among an 
 unfree majority of non-owners for the benefit of a 
 free minority of owners. And I say that this tendency 
 is due to the fact that the Socialist ideal, in conflict 
 with and yet informing the body of Capitalism, pro- 
 duces a third thing very different from the Socialist 
 ideal — to wit,the Servile State. It is important to have 
 this point clear, and perhaps a metaphor is needed. 
 I will present one. 
 
 A traveller sincerely desirous of escaping from the 
 cold climate of the mountains conceives the obvious 
 plan of going South, where he will find lower and 
 warmer land. With this project in his head he finds 
 a river flowing in a southerly direction and he says, 
 " If I travel upon this River I will reach my object 
 the more readily." One who has studied the nature of 
 that mountainous region may say to him: "You are 
 in error. The very evils from which you are trying to 
 escape, the mountains, are so constructed that in a 
 ix 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 short while you will find them diverting the course 
 of this River northward again. Indeed, if you will 
 look at your compass you will see that the big bend 
 has already begun." 
 
 The traveller is the Socialist. The South which he 
 desires to reach is the Collectivist State. The River is 
 modern"Organised Reform." The Northern country 
 where the mountain River will ultimately find a quiet 
 bed is a society reposing upon compulsory labour. 
 
 A man thus speaking to the traveller would not be 
 denying either the sincerity of his desire to get south- 
 ward or his belief that the River would lead him 
 there; all he would be denying would be the fact that 
 the River does lead him there. 
 
 There is only one discrepancy in this parallel, 
 which is that the traveller in the metaphor could, 
 upon being convinced of his error, leave the River 
 and get South by land. That would correspond in 
 the case of the Socialist to a bold policy of Confisca- 
 tion, to a taking of the means of production from the 
 hands of those who now own them and to a placing 
 of them in the hands of politicians to be held in trust 
 for the community. 
 
 I nowhere deny in my book that this is ideally pos- 
 sible: just as it is ideally possible that to-morrow all 
 Englishmen shall take and preserve for twenty-four 
 hours a vow of silence. What I say is that nothing 
 like it or approaching it has ever been done or is now 
 
PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION 
 
 being done. I say further, what is of capital import- 
 ance, that with every step taken along the existing 
 lines of change ic our industrial society we are mak- 
 ing it more and more difficult to retrace such steps, 
 to abandon the accepted method and to pursue the 
 Collectivist ideal. The path of Confiscation, the only 
 way by which Socialists can reach their goal, gets 
 more and more remote with every new and positive 
 economic reform, undertaken, remember, with the aid 
 and under the advice of Socialists themselves. 
 
 These, then, are the three main points, I think, upon 
 which there has been misconception and against 
 whichlhopelmaywarnthereader. To recapitulate: — 
 
 (i) The misconception that I have used the word 
 " servile " in some rhetorical sense of " irksome " or 
 "oppressive," whereas I have attempted to use it only 
 under the limits of my definition, viz., That labour is 
 "servile"which is undertaken not in fulfilmentof con- 
 tract but under the compulsion of positive law and 
 which attaches to the status of the labourer, and is 
 performed for the benefit of others who are under no 
 such compulsion. 
 
 (2) The misconception that the advent of the Ser- 
 vile State is put forward for a warning or a danger- 
 sign : I am concerned in this book to say how and 
 why we are approaching it ; not whether we should 
 approach it. 
 
 (3) The misconception that I have mis-stated the 
 xi 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 aims and the convictions of Socialists. These aims 
 and convictions are simple enough, and my point is 
 not that they are either illusions or doubtful, but that 
 in point of fact we are not heading towards them and 
 that the effect of Socialist doctrine upon Capitalist 
 society is to produce a third thing different from either 
 of its two begetters — to wit, the Servile State. 
 
 Apart from these three main points I must, in view 
 of certain less intelligent criticisms the book has pro- 
 voked, mention one or two other matters. 
 
 Thus, my argument that slavery was slowly trans- 
 formed and that the old Pagan Servile State slowly 
 approached a Distributive State under the influence 
 of the Catholic Church is not a piece of special plead- 
 ing put forward to please my co-religionists. It is a 
 plain piece of historical fact which anyone can verify 
 for himself, and which many do not regard as an 
 advantage, but as a disadvantage inflicted upon hu- 
 manity by the advent of this religion. Whether the 
 servile institution be a good or a bad thing, it did, as 
 a matter of fact, slowly disappear as Catholic civilisa- 
 tion developed ; and it has, as a matter of fact, slowly 
 begun to return where Catholic civilisation has re- 
 ceded. 
 
 Nor have I said that the goal of a completely free 
 Distributive State was ever reached. I have said that 
 it was in process of formation when the disruption of 
 our united European civilisation in the sixteenth cen- 
 
 xii 
 
PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION 
 
 tury arrested its development and slowly produced, 
 in this country especially, Capitalism in its stead. 
 
 Again, examples of State regulation and of State 
 or Municipal economic enterprise increasing rapidly 
 among us obviously do not affect my argument. Un- 
 less or until these are based upon a policy of Confis- 
 cation they are no more an example of Socialism 
 than the explosion of gunpowder is an example of 
 warfare. They are no more " Socialistic efforts " or 
 "beginnings" or "experiments in Socialism" than 
 fireworks at the Crystal Palace are "military" efforts 
 or "beginnings" or "experiments in militarism." So- 
 cialism would indeed involve such regulations and 
 suchmunicipal enterprise just as war involves the ex- 
 plosion of gunpowder; but they do not form its es- 
 sence at all. Its essence consists in vesting in trust 
 with the politicians what is now private property. 
 When Municipal and State enterprise accompanied 
 byMunicipalandStateregulationisbased upon loans 
 instead of Confiscation, nay, loans devised to avoid 
 Confiscation, it is a negation of Socialism; and I have 
 shown that attempts to mask the capitalist character 
 of such operations by the machinery of sinking funds 
 and the rest are logically worthless. You cannot " buy 
 out" Capitalism. 
 
 I need not point out what steps have been taken, 
 even in the very short time since this book first ap- 
 peared, in the direction which it is intended to explain. 
 xiii 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 We already have Wages Boards in one great indus- 
 try; we shall shortly have them in more. We already 
 have the registration of the proletariat with name, 
 address, movement from place to place, nature of ill- 
 ness when illness is incurred, supposed orreal"malin- 
 gering,"indulgenceinthis or that vice (such asdrink), 
 domestic habits, nature of employment, and all the 
 rest of it very nearly complete, and imposed by the 
 wealthier classes who are the actual gatherers of the 
 Poll Tax upon which this registration is based. We 
 have through the Labour Exchanges a system which 
 will soon be equally complete and by which every 
 member of the proletariat will ultimately be similarly 
 registered as a worker, his tendencies to rebellion a- 
 gainst Capital known and their frequency set down, 
 how far he is willing to serve Capitalism, whether and 
 when he has refused service, and if so where and why. 
 The reader will be interested to note amid the ac- 
 cidents and reactions of the years immediately be- 
 fore us the slowperfection of this system: registration 
 and control of the proletariat, with its necessary and 
 fatal approach towards the term of compulsory lab- 
 our. But I think in justice to my book I should point 
 out to that same reader the meaning of its conclud- 
 ing pages. No change in European society arrives at 
 completion unless it is universal throughout Europe. 
 Capitalism is not thus universal; it is developed in 
 very different degrees in different parts of Europe; the 
 
 xiv 
 
PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION 
 
 advent of servitude is therefore a probability differ- 
 ing in degree with different portions of European so- 
 ciety. It is evident that theexample of economic free- 
 dom elsewhere may in the future transform, and will 
 certainly limit, such sections of European life as are 
 drifting towards the re-establishment of slavery. But 
 the tendency to the re-establishment of slavery as a 
 necessary development of Capitalism is patent wher- 
 ever Capitalism has power, and nowhere more than 
 in this country. H. BELLOC. 
 
 Kings Land, Shipley, 
 Horsham, Sussex. 
 
SYNOPSIS OF THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 The SubjectofthisBook:— Itis written to main- 
 tain the thesis that industrial society as we know it 
 will tend towards the re-establishment of slavery 
 — The sections into which the book will be divided 
 
 SECTION I 
 Definitions : — What wealth is and why necessary 
 to man — How produced — The meaning of the 
 words Capital, Proletariat, Property, Means of Pro- 
 duction — The definition of the Capitalist State — 
 The definition of the Servile State— What it is 
 and what it is not — The re-establishment of status 
 in the place of contract — That servitude is not a 
 question of degree but of kind — Summary of these 
 
 definitions P a g e i r 
 
 SECTION II 
 Our Civilisation was originally Servile : — 
 The Servile institution in Pagan antiquity — Its fun- 
 damental character — A Pagan society took it for 
 granted — The institution disturbed by the adventof 
 
 the Christian Church page 31 
 
 SECTION III 
 How the Servile Institution was for a Time 
 Dissolved : — The subconscious effect of the Faith 
 in this matter — The main elements of Pagan eco- 
 nomic society — The Villa — The transformation of 
 the agricultural slave into the Christian serf— Next 
 into the Christian peasant — The corresponding er- 
 ection throughout Christendom of the Distribu- 
 tive State — It is nearly complete at the close of 
 the Middle Ages — " It was not machinery that lost 
 us our freedom, it was the loss of a free mind" . page 41 
 
 SECTION IV 
 How the Distributive State failed : — This 
 failureoriginalinEngland— The story of the decline 
 from Distributive property to Capitalism— The eco- 
 nomic revolution of the sixteenth century— The con- 
 fiscation of monastic land— What might have hap- 
 
SYNOPSIS OF THE SERVILE STATU 
 
 pened had the State retained it — As a fact that land 
 is captured by an oligarchy — England is Capitalist 
 before the advent of the industrial revolution — 
 Therefore modern industry, proceeding from Eng- 
 land, has grown in a Capitalist mould . . page 57 
 
 SECTION V 
 The Capitalist State in Proportion as it 
 grows Perfect grows Unstable — It can of its 
 nature be but a transitory phase lying between an 
 earlier and a later stable state of society — The two 
 internal strains which render it unstable — (a) The 
 conflict between its social realities and its moral and 
 legal basis — (6) The insecurity and insufficiency to 
 which it condemns free citizens — The few posses- 
 sors can grant or withhold livelihood from the many 
 non - possessors — Capitalism is so unstable that it 
 dares not proceed to its own logical conclusion, but 
 tends to restrict competition among owners, and in- 
 security and insufficiency among non-owners page 81 
 
 SECTION VI 
 The Stable Solutions of this Instability :— 
 The three stable social arrangements which alone 
 can take the place of unstable Capitalism — The 
 Distributive solution, the Collectivist solution, the 
 Set vile solution — The reformer will not openly ad- 
 vocate the Servile solution — There remain only the 
 Distributive and the Collectivist solution P a ge 97 
 
 SECTION VII 
 Socialism is the Easiest Apparent Solution 
 of the Capitalist Crux : — A contrast between 
 the reformermakingfor Distribution and the reform- 
 ermakingfor Socialism (or Collectivism) — Thediffi- 
 culties met by the first type — He is working against 
 the grain — The second is working with the grain — 
 Collectivism a natural developmentof Capitalism — 
 It appeals both to Capitalist and Proletarian — None 
 the less we shall see that the Collectivist attempt is 
 
 xviil 
 
SYNOPSIS OF THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 doomed to fail and to produce a thing very different 
 from its object — to wit, the Serville State . page 105 
 
 SECTION VIII 
 The Reformers and the Reformed are Both 
 Making for the Servile State :— Therearetwo 
 types of reformers working along the line of least re- 
 sistance — These are the Socialist and the Practical 
 Man — The Socialist again isof two kinds,The Hum- 
 anist and the Statistician — TheHumanistwouldlike 
 both to confiscate from the owners and to establish 
 security and sufficiency for the non-owners — He is 
 allowed to do the second thingby establishing servile 
 conditions — He is forbidden to do thefirst — The 
 Statistician is quite content so long as he can run and 
 organise the poor — Both are canalised towards the 
 Servile State and both are shepherded off their ideal 
 Collectivist State — Meanwhile the great mass, the 
 proletariat, upon whom the reformers are at work, 
 though retaining the instinct of ownership, has lost 
 any experienceofitandis subject toprivate law much 
 more than to the law of the Courts — This is exact- 
 ly what happened in the past during the converse 
 change from Slavery to Freedom — Private Law be- 
 came stronger than Public at the beginning of the 
 Dark Ages — The owners welcomed the changes 
 which maintained them in ownership and yet in- 
 creased the security of their revenue — To-day the 
 non-owners will welcome whatever keeps them a 
 wage-earning class but increases their wages and 
 their security without insisting on the expropriation 
 of the owners page 121 
 
 An Appendix showing that the Collectivist proposal 
 to "Buy-Out " the Capitalist in lieu of expropriating him 
 is vain. 
 
 SECTION IX 
 The Servile State has Begun : — The manifest- 
 ation of the Servile State in law or proposals of law 
 will fall into two sorts — (a) Laws or proposals of law 
 xix 
 
SYNOPSIS OF THE SERVILE STATU 
 
 compelling the proletariat to work — (b) Financial op- 
 erations riveting the grip of capitalists more strongly 
 upon society — As to (a), we find it Already at work 
 in measures such as the Insurance Act and pro- 
 posals such as Compulsory Arbitration, the enforce- 
 ment of Trades Union bargains and the erection of 
 "Labour Colonies," etc., for the "unemployable" — 
 As to the second, we find that so-called " Municipal" 
 or "Socialist" experiments in acquiring the means 
 of production have Already increased and are con- 
 tinually increasing the dependence of society upon 
 the Capitalist . . . . page 15$ 
 
 CONCLUSION .... ,,187 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 THE SUBJECT OF THIS BOOK 
 
I NTRODUCTION 
 
 THE SUBJECT OF THIS BOOK 
 
 THIS BOOK IS WRITTEN TO MAINTAIN 
 and prove the following truth : — 
 
 That our free modern society^in which the means \ 
 of production are owned by a few ) being necessarily 
 in unstable equilibrium, it is tending to reach a 
 condition of stable equilibrium BY THE ESTABLISH- 
 MENT OF COMPULSORY LABOUR LEGALLY ENFORC- 
 IBLE UPON THOSE WHO DO NOT OWN THE MEANS 
 OF PRODUCTION FOR THE ADVANTAGE OF THOSE 
 WHO DO. With this principle of compulsion applied 
 against the non-owners there must also come a differ- 
 ence in their status ; and in the eyes of society and 
 of its positive law men will be divided into two sets : 
 the first economically free and politically free, pos- 
 sessed of the means of production, and securely con- 
 firmed in that possession ; the second economically 
 unfree and politically unfree, but at first secured by 
 their very lack of freedom in certain necessaries of life 
 and in a minimum of well-being beneath which they 
 shall not fall. 
 
 Society having reached such a condition would be 
 released from its present internal strains and would 
 have taken on a form which would be stable : that 
 is, capable of being indefinitely prolonged without 
 change. In it would be resolved the various factors 
 of instability which increasingly disturb that form of 
 society called Capitalist, and men would be satisfied 
 3 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 to accept, and to continue in, such a settlement. 
 
 To such a stable society I shall give, for reasons 
 which will be described in the next section, the title 
 of The Servile State. 
 
 I shall not undertake to judge whether this ap- 
 proaching organisation of our modern society be 
 good or evil. I shall concern myself only with show- 
 ing the necessary tendency towards it which has long 
 existed and the recent social provisions which show 
 that it has actually begun. 
 
 This new state will be acceptable to those who 
 desire consciously or by implication the re-establish- 
 ment among us of a difference of status between pos- 
 sessor and non-possessor : it will be distasteful to 
 those who regard such a distinction with ill favour or 
 with dread. 
 
 My business will not be to enter into the discussion 
 between these two types of modern thinkers, but to 
 point out to each and to both that that which the one 
 favours and the other would fly is upon them. 
 
 I shall prove my thesis in particular from the case 
 of the industrial society of Great Britain, including 
 that small, alien, and exceptional corner of Ireland, 
 which suffers or enjoys industrial conditions to-day. 
 
 I shall divide the matter thus : — 
 
 (i) I shall lay down certain definitions. 
 
 (2) Next, I shall describe the institution of slavery 
 and The Servile State of which it is the basis, as 
 
 4 
 
THE SUBJECT OF THIS BOOK 
 
 these were in the ancient world. 
 I shall then : 
 
 (3) Sketch very briefly the process whereby that 
 age-long institution of slavery was slowly dissolved 
 during the Christian centuries, and whereby the re- 
 sulting mediaeval system ; based upon highly divided 
 property in the means of production, was 
 
 (4) wrecked in certain areas of Europe as it ap- 
 proached completion, and had substituted for it, in 
 practice though not in legal theory, a society based 
 upon Capitalism. 
 
 (5) Next, I shall show how Capitalism was of its 
 nature unstable, because its social realities were in 
 conflict with all existing or possible systems of law, 
 and because its effects in denying sufficiency and se- 
 curity were intolerable to men ; how being thus tin- 
 stable, it consequently presented a problem which 
 demanded a solution : to wit, the establishment of 
 some stable form of society whose law and social 
 practice should correspond, and whose economic re- 
 sults, by providing sufficiency and security, should be 
 tolerable to human nature. 
 
 (6) I shall next present the only three possible 
 solutions : — 
 
 (a) Collectivism, or the placing of the means of 
 production in the hands of the political officers of 
 the community. 
 
 (b) Property, or the re-establishment of a Distri- 
 5 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 butive State in which the mass of citizens should 
 severally own the means of production. 
 
 (c) Slavery, or a Servile State in which those who 
 do not own the means of production shall be legally 
 compelled to work for those who do, and shall receive 
 in exchange a security of livelihood. 
 
 Now, seeing the distaste which the remains of our 
 long Christian tradition have bred in us for directly 
 advocating the third solution and boldly supporting 
 the re-establishment of slavery, the first two alone are 
 open to reformers : ( I ) a reaction towards a condition 
 of well-divided property or the Distributive State; (2) 
 an attempt to achieve the ideal Collectivist State. 
 
 It can easily be shown that this second solution 
 appeals most naturally and easily to a society al- 
 ready Capitalist on account of the difficulty which 
 such a society has to discover the energy, the will, 
 and the vision requisite for the first solution. 
 
 (7) I shall next proceed to show how the pursuit 
 of this ideal Collectivist State which is bred of Capi- 
 talism leads men acting upon a Capitalist society not 
 towards the Collectivist State nor anythinglikeit,but 
 tothat third utterly different thing — the Set-vile State. 
 
 To this eighth section I shalladd an appendix show- 
 ing how the attempt to achieve Collectivism gradu- 
 ally by public purchase is based upon an illusion. 
 
 (8) Recognising that theoretical argument of this 
 kind, though intellectually convincing, is not suffi- 
 
THE SUBJECT OF THIS BOOK 
 
 cient to the establishment of my thesis, I shall con- 
 clude by giving examples from modern English leg- 
 islation, which examples prove that the Servile State 
 is actually upon us. 
 
 Such is the scheme I design for this book. 
 
SECTION ONE 
 
 DEFINITIONS 
 
SECTION THE FIRST DEFINITIONS 
 
 MAN, LIKE EVERY OTHER ORGANISM, 
 can only live by the transformation of his environ- 
 ment to his own use. He must transform his en- 
 vironment from a condition where it is less to a con- 
 dition where it is more subservient to his needs. 
 
 That special, conscious, and intelligent transforma- 
 tion of his environment which is peculiar to the pe- 
 culiar intelligence and creative faculty of man we 
 call the Production of Wealth. 
 
 Wealth is matter which has been consciously and 
 intelligently transformed from a condition in which 
 it is less to a condition in which it is more service- 
 able to a human need. 
 
 Without Wealth man cannot exist. The produc- 
 tion of it is a necessity to him, and though it proceeds 
 from the more to the less necessary, and even to those 
 forms of production which we call luxuries, yet in 
 any given human society there is a certain kind and 
 a certain amount of wealth without which human life 
 cannot be lived : as, for instance, in England to-day, 
 certain forms of elaborately prepared food, clothing, 
 fuel, and habitation. 
 
 Therefore, to control the production of wealth is to 
 control human life itself. To refuse man the opportu- 
 nity for the production of wealth is to refuse him the 
 opportunity for life; and, in general, the way in which 
 the production of wealth is by law permitted is the 
 only way in which the citizens can legally exist. 
 II 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 Wealth can only be produced by the application 
 of human energy, mental and physical, to the forces 
 of nature around us, and to the material which those 
 forces inform. 
 
 This human energy so applicable to the material 
 world and its forces we will call Labour. As for that 
 material and those natural forces, we will call them, 
 for the sake of shortness, by the narrow, but conven- 
 tionally accepted, term Land. 
 
 It would seem, therefore, that all problems con- 
 nected with the production of wealth, and all discus- 
 sion thereupon, involve but two principal original 
 factors, to wit, Labour and Land. But it so happens 
 that the conscious, artificial, and intelligent action of 
 man upon nature, corresponding to his peculiar char- 
 acter compared with other created beings, introduces 
 a third factor of the utmost importance. 
 
 Man proceeds to create wealth by ingenious meth- 
 ods of varying and often increasing complexity, and 
 aids himself by the construction oi implements. These 
 soon become in each new department of the produc- 
 tion as truly necessary to that production as labour 
 and land. Further, any process of production takes a 
 certain time ; during that time the producer must be 
 fed, and clothed, and housed, and the rest of it. There 
 must therefore be an accumulation of wealth created 
 in the past, and reserved with the object of maintain- 
 ing labour during its effort to produce for the future. 
 
 12 
 
DEFINITIONS 
 
 Whether it be the making of an instrument or tool, 
 or the setting aside of a store of provisions, labour 
 applied to land for either purpose is not producing 
 wealth for immediate consumption. It is setting 
 aside and reserving somewhat, and that somewhat is 
 always necessary in varying proportions according 
 to the simplicity or complexity of the economic 
 society to the production of wealth. 
 
 To such wealth reserved and set aside for the pur- 
 poses of future production, and not for immediate 
 consumption, whether it be in the form of instru- 
 ments and tools, or in the form of stores for the main- 
 tenance of labour during the process of production, 
 we give the name of Capital. 
 
 There are thus three factors in the production of 
 all human wealth, which we may conventionally term 
 Land, Capital, and Labour. 
 
 When we talk o f the M eans of Production we sig- 
 nify land and capital combined. Thus, when we say 
 that a man is" dispossessed of the means of produc- 
 tion," or cannot produce wealth save by the leave 
 of another who "possesses the means of production," 
 we mean that he is the master only of his labour 
 and has no control, in any useful amount, over either 
 capital, or land, or both combined. 
 
 A man politically free, that is, one who enjoys 
 the right before the law to exercise his energies 
 when he pleases (or not at all if he does not so please), 
 13 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 but not possessed by legal right of control over any 
 useful amount of the means of production, we call 
 proletarian, and any considerable class composed of 
 such men we call a proletariat. 
 
 Property is a term used for that arrangement in 
 society whereby the control of land and of wealth 
 made from land, including therefore all the means 
 of production, is vested in some person or corpora- 
 tion. Thus we may say of a building, including the 
 land upon which it stands, that it is the " property " 
 of such and such a citizen, or family, or college, or 
 of the State, meaning that those who " own " such 
 property are guaranteed by the laws in the right 
 to use it or withhold it from use. Private property 
 signifies such wealth (including the means of pro- 
 duction) as may, by the arrangements of society, be 
 in the control of persons or corporations other than 
 the political bodies of which these persons or cor- 
 porations are in another aspect members. What dis- 
 tinguishes private property is not that the posses- 
 sor thereof is less than the State, or is only a part 
 of the State (for were that so we should talk of muni- 
 cipal property as private property), but rather that 
 the owner may exercise his control over it to his own 
 advantage, and not as a trustee for society, nor in the 
 hierarchy of political institutions. Thus Mr Jones 
 is a citizen of Manchester, but he does not own his 
 private property as a citizen of Manchester, he owns 
 
 14 
 
DEFINITIONS 
 
 it as Mr Jones, whereas, if the house next to his own 
 be owned by the Manchester municipality, they own 
 it only because they are a political body standing 
 for the whole community of the town. Mr Jones 
 might move to Glasgow and still own his property 
 in Manchester, but the municipality of Manchester 
 can only own its property in connection with the 
 corporate political life of the town. 
 
 An ideal society in which the means of production 
 should be in the hands of the political officers of the 
 community we call Collectivist, or more generally 
 Socialist* 
 
 A society in which private property in land and 
 capital, that is, the ownership and therefore the con- 
 trol of the means of production, is confined to some 
 number of free citizens not large enough todetermine 
 the social mass of the State, while the rest have not 
 such property and are therefore proletarian, we call 
 Capitalist ; and the method by which wealth is pro- 
 duced in such a society can only be the application 
 of labour, the determining mass of which must neces- 
 sarily be proletarian, to land and capital, in such 
 fashion that, of the total wealth produced, the Prole- 
 tariat which labours shall only receive a portion. 
 
 The two marks, then, defining the Capitalist State 
 
 * Save in this special sense of " Collectivist," the word " So- 
 cialist" has either no clear meaning, or is used synonymously 
 with other older and better-known words. 
 
 15 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 are: (i) That the citizens thereof are politically free: 
 i.e. can use or withhold at will their possessions or 
 their labour, but are also (2) divided into capitalist 
 and proletarian in such proportions that the State 
 as a whole is not characterised by the institution of 
 ownership among free citizens, but by the restriction 
 of ownership to a section markedly less than the 
 whole, or even to a small minority. Such a Capitalist 
 State is essentially divided into two classes of free 
 citizens, the one capitalist or owning, the other pro- 
 pertyless or proletarian. 
 
 My last definition concerns the Servile State it- 
 self, and since the idea is both somewhat novel and 
 also the subject of this book, I will not only establish 
 but expand its definition. 
 
 The definition of the Servile State is as follows: — 
 
 " That arrangement of society in which so consider- 
 able a number of the families and individuals are con- 
 strained by positive law to labour for the advantage of 
 other families and individuals as to stamp the whole 
 community with the mark of such labour we call THE 
 Servile State." 
 
 Note first certain negative limitations in the above 
 which must be clearly seized if we are not to lose 
 clear thinking in a fog of metaphor and rhetoric. 
 
 That society is not servile in which men are in- 
 telligently constrained to labour by enthusiasm, by 
 a religious tenet, or indirectly from fear of destitu- 
 
 16 
 
DEFINITIONS 
 
 tion, or directly from love of gain, or from the com- 
 mon sense which teaches them that by their labour 
 they may increase their well-being. 
 
 A clear boundary exists between the servile and 
 the non-servile condition of labour, and the condi- 
 tions upon either side of that boundary utterly differ 
 one from another. Where there is compulsion ap- 
 plicable by positive law to men of a certain stalus,and 
 such compulsion enforced in the last resort by the 
 powers at the disposal of the State, there is the in- 
 stitution of Slavery ; and if that institution be suf- 
 ficiently expanded the whole State may be said to 
 repose upon a servile basis, and is a Servile State. 
 
 Where such formal, legal status is absent the condi- 
 tions are not servile; and the difference between servi- 
 tude and freedom, appreciable in a thousand details 
 of actual life, is most glaring in this : that the free 
 man can refuse his labour and use that refusal as an 
 instrument wherewith to bargain ; while the slave 
 has no such instrument or power to bargain at all, 
 but is dependent for his well-being upon the custom 
 of society, backed by the regulation of such of its 
 laws as may protect and guarantee the slave. 
 
 Next, let it be observed that the State is not ser- 
 vile because the mere institution of slavery is to be 
 discovered somewhere within its confines. The State 
 is only servile when so considerable a body of forced 
 labour is affected by the compulsion of positive law 
 17 2 
 
/ 
 
 THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 as to give a character to the whole community. 
 
 Similarly, that State is not servile in which a, 
 citizens are liable to submit their energies to the corr 
 pulsion of positive law, and must labour at the di: 
 cretion of State officials. By loose metaphor an 
 for rhetorical purposes men who dislike Collectivisr 
 (for instance) or the discipline of a regiment will tal 
 of the " servile " conditions of such organisation! 
 But for the purposes of strict definition and clea 
 thinking it is essential to remember that a servile cor 
 dition only exists by contrast with a free conditior 
 The servile condition is present in society only whei 
 there is also present the free citizen for whose bene 
 fit the slave works under the compulsion of positiv 
 law. 
 
 Again, it should be noted that this word " servile 
 in no way connotes the worst, nor even necessaril; 
 a bad, arrangement of society. This point is so clea 
 that it should hardly delay us; but a confusion be 
 tween the rhetorical and the precise use of the won 
 servile I have discovered to embarrass public dis 
 cussion of the matter so much that I must once mor 
 emphasise what should be self-evident. 
 
 The discussion as to whether the institution o 
 slavery be a good or a bad one, or be relatively bette 
 or worse than other alternative institutions, has noth 
 ing whatever to do with the exact definition of tha 
 institution. Thus Monarchy consists in throwing th 
 
 1 
 
DEFINITIONS 
 
 responsibility for the direction of society upon an 
 individual. One can imagine some Roman of the 
 first century praising the new Imperial power, but 
 through a muddle-headed tradition against " kings " 
 swearing that he would never tolerate a " monarchy." 
 Such a fellow would have been a very futile critic of 
 public affairs under Trajan, but no more futile than 
 a man who swears that nothing shall make him a 
 "slave," though well prepared to accept laws that 
 compel him to labour without his consent, under the 
 forceof public law, and upon terms dictated by others. 
 
 Many would argue that a man so compelled to 
 labour, guaranteed against insecurity and against in- 
 sufficiency of food, housing and clothing, promised 
 subsistence for his old age, and a similar set of ad- 
 vantages for his posterity, would be a great deal better 
 off than a free man lacking all these things. But the 
 argument does not affect the definition attaching to 
 the word servile. A devout Christian of blameless 
 life drifting upon an ice-floe in the Arctic night, 
 without food or any prospect of succour, is not so 
 comfortably circumstanced as the Khedive of Egypt; 
 but it would be folly in establishing the definition of 
 the words "Christian" and "Mahommedan" to bring 
 this contrast into account. 
 
 We must then, throughout this inquiry, keep strict- 
 ly to the economic aspect of the case. Only when 
 that is established and when the modern tendency 
 19 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 to the re-establishment of slavery is clear, are we free 
 to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the 
 revolution through which we are passing. 
 
 It must further be grasped that the essential mark 
 of the Servile Institution does not depend upon the 
 ownership of the slave by a particular master. That 
 the institution of slavery tends to that form under the 
 various forces composing human nature and human 
 society is probable enough. That if or when slavery 
 were re-established in England a particular man 
 would in time be found the slave not of Capitalism 
 in general but of, say, the Shell Oil Trust in partic- 
 ular, is a very likely development ; and we know that 
 in societies where the institution was of immemorial 
 antiquity such direct possession of the slave by the 
 free man or corporation of free men had come to be 
 the rule. But my point is that such a mark is not 
 essential to the character of slavery. As an initial 
 phase in the institution of slavery, or even as a per- 
 manent phase marking society for an indefinite time, 
 it is perfectly easy to conceive of a whole class ren- 
 dered servile by positive law, and compelled by such 
 law to labour for the advantage of another non-ser- 
 vile free class, without any direct act of possession 
 permitted to one man over the person of another. 
 
 The final contrast thus established between slave 
 and free might be maintained by the State guaran- 
 teeing to the im-free, security in their subsistence, to 
 
 20 
 
DEFINITIONS 
 
 the free, security in their property and profits, rent 
 and interest. What would mark the slave in such a 
 society would be his belonging to that set or status 
 which was compelled by no matter what definition 
 to labour, and was thus cut off from the other set or 
 status not compelled to labour, but free to labour or 
 not as it willed. 
 
 Again, the ServileStatewould certainly exist even 
 though a man, being only compelled to labour dur- 
 ing a portion of his time, were free to bargain and 
 even to accumulate in his " free " time. The old law- 
 yers used to distinguish between a serf " in gross " 
 and a serf " regardant." A serf " in gross " was one 
 who was a serf at all times and places, and not in re- 
 spect to a particular lord. A serf " regardant " was a 
 serf only in his bondage to serve a particular lord. 
 He was free as against other men. And one might 
 perfectly well have slaves who were only slaves " re- 
 gardant " to a particular type of employment during 
 particular hours. But they would be slaves none the 
 less, and if their hours were many and their class 
 numerous, the State which they supported would be 
 a Servile State. 
 
 Lastly, let it be remembered that the servile con- 
 dition remains as truly an institution of the State 
 when it attaches permanently and irrevocably at any 
 one time to a set condition of human beings as when 
 it attaches to a particular class throughout their lives. 
 21 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 ^Thus the laws of Paganism permitted the slave to 
 be enfranchised by his master : it further permitted 
 children or prisoners to be sold into slavery. The 
 Servile Institution, though perpetually changing in 
 the elements of its composition, was still an unchang- 
 ing factor in the State. Similarly, though the State 
 should only subject to slavery those whohad lessthan 
 a certain income, while leaving men free to pass by 
 inheritance or otherwise out of, and by loss to pass 
 into, the slave class, that slave class, though fluctuat- 
 ing as to its composition, would still permanently 
 exist. 
 
 Thus, if the modern industrial State shall make a 
 law by which servile conditions shall not attach to 
 those capable of earning more than a certain sum by 
 their own labour, but shall attach to those who earn 
 less than this sum ; or if the modern industrial State 
 defines manual labour in a particular fashion, renders 
 it compulsory during a fixed time for those who un- 
 dertake it, but leaves them free to turn later to other 
 occupations if they choose, undoubtedly such dis- 
 tinctions, though they attach to conditions and not 
 to a class, establish the Servile Institution. 
 
 Some considerable number must be manual work- 
 ers by definition, and while they were so defined would 
 be slaves. Here again the composition of the Servile 
 group would fluctuate, but the institution would be 
 fixed and large enough to stamp all society. I need 
 
 22 
 
DEFINITIONS 
 
 not insist upon the practical effect : that such a con- 
 dition, once established, tends to permanence in the 
 great majority of those who suffer it, and that the 
 individuals entering or leaving servitude tend to be- 
 come few compared to the whole mass. 
 
 There is one last point to be considered in this de- 
 finition. 
 
 It is this : — 
 
 Since, in the nature of things, a free society must 
 enforce a contract (a free society consisting in noth- 
 ing else but the enforcement of free contracts), how 
 far can that be called a Servile condition which is the 
 result of contract nominally or really free ? In other 
 words, is not a contract to labour, however freely en- 
 tered into, servile of its nature when enforced by the 
 State ? 
 
 For instance, I have no food or clothing, nor do I 
 possess the means of production whereby I can pro- 
 duce any wealth in exchange for such. I am so cir- 
 cumstanced that an owner of the Means of Produc- 
 tion will not allow me access to those Means unless 
 I sign a contract to serve him for a week at a wage 
 of bare subsistence. Does the State in enforcing that 
 contract make me for that week a slave ? 
 
 Obviously not. For the institution of Slavery pre- 
 supposes a certain attitude of mind in the free man 
 and in the slave, a habit of living in either, and the 
 stamp of both those habits upon society. No such 
 
 23 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 effects are produced by a contract enforceable to the 
 length of one week. The duration of human life is 
 such, and the prospect of posterity, that the fulfilling 
 of such a contract in no way wounds the senses of 
 liberty and of choice. 
 
 What of a month.a year.ten years, a lifetime? Sup- 
 pose an extreme case, and a destitute man to sign a 
 contract binding him and all his children who were 
 minors to work for a bare subsistence until his own 
 death, or the attainment of majority of the children, 
 whichever event might happen latest ; would the 
 State in enforcing that contract be making the man 
 a slave? 
 
 As undoubtedly as it would not be making him a 
 slave in the first case, it would be making him a slave 
 in the second. 
 
 One can only say to ancient sophistical difficulties 
 of this kind, that the sense of men establishes for itself 
 the true limits of any object, as of freedom. What 
 freedom is, or is not, in so far as mere measure of time 
 is concerned (though of course much else than time 
 enters in),human habit determines; but the enforcing 
 of a contract of service certainly or probably leaving 
 a choice after its expiration is consonant with free- 
 dom. The enforcement of a contract probably bind- 
 ing one's whole life is not consonant with freedom. 
 One binding to service a man's natural heirs is in- 
 tolerable to freedom. 
 
 24 
 
DEFINITIONS 
 
 Consider another converse point. A man binds 
 himself to work for life and his children after him so 
 far as the law may permit him to bind them in a 
 particular society, but that not for a bare subsistence, 
 but for so large a wage that he will be wealthy in a 
 few years, and his posterity, when the contractis com- 
 pleted , wealthier still. Does the State in forcing such 
 a contract make the fortunate employee a slave ? 
 No. For it is in the essence of slavery that subsist- 
 ence or little more than subsistence should be guar- 
 anteed to the slave. Slavery exists in order that the 
 Free should benefit by its existence, and connotes a 
 condition in which the men subjected to it may de- 
 mand secure existence, but little more. 
 
 If anyone were to draw an exact line, and to say 
 that a life-contract enforceable by law was slavery 
 at so many shillings a week, but ceased to be slavery 
 after that margin, his effort would be folly. None the 
 less, there is a standard of subsistence in any one 
 society, the guarantee of which (or little more) under 
 an obligation to labour by compulsion is slavery, 
 while the guarantee of very much moreis not slavery. 
 
 This verbal jugglery might be continued. It is a 
 type of verbal difficulty apparent in every inquiry 
 open to the professional disputant, but of no effect 
 upon the mind of the honest inquirer whose business 
 is not dialectic but truth. 
 
 It is always possible by establishing a cross-sec- 
 
 25 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 tion in a set of definitions to pose the unanswerable 
 difficulty of degree, but that will never affect the 
 realities of discussion. We know, for instance, what 
 is meant by torture when it exists in a code of laws, 
 and when it is forbidden. No imaginary difficulties 
 of degree between pulling a man's hair and scalping 
 him, between warming him and burning him alive, 
 will disturb a reformer whose business it is to ex- 
 punge torture from some penal code. 
 
 In the same way we know what is and what is not 
 compulsory labour, what is and what is not the Ser- 
 vile Condition. Its test is, I repeat, the withdrawal 
 from a man of his free choice to labour or not to 
 labour, here or there, for such and such an object ; 
 and the compelling of him by positive law to labour 
 for the advantage of others who do not fall under the 
 same compulsion. 
 
 Where you have that, you have slavery : with all 
 the manifold, spiritual, and political results of that 
 ancient institution. 
 
 Where you have slavery affecting a class of such 
 considerable size as to mark and determine the char- 
 acter of the State, there you have the Servile State. 
 
 To sum up, then : — The Servile State is that 
 in which we find so considerable a body of families 
 and individuals distinguished from free citizens by 
 the mark of compulsory labour as to stamp a general 
 
DEFINITIONS 
 
 character upon society, and all the chief characters, 
 good or evil, attaching to the institution of slavery 
 will be found permeating such a State, whether the 
 slaves be directly and personally attached to their 
 masters, only indirectly attached through the medi- 
 um of the State, or attached in a third manner 
 through their subservience to corporations or to par- 
 ticular industries. The slave so compelled to labour 
 will be one dispossessed of the means of production, 
 and compelled by law to labour for the advantage 
 of all or any who are possessed thereof. And the 
 distinguishing mark of the slave proceeds from the 
 special action upon him of a positive law which sep- 
 arates within the general body of the community one 
 body of men, the less-free, from another, the more- 
 free, in the function of contract. 
 
 Now, from a purely Servile conception of produc- 
 tion and of the arrangement of society we Europeans 
 sprang. The Immemorial past of Europe is a Servile 
 past. During some centuries which the Church raised, 
 permeated, and constructed, Europe was gradually re- 
 leased or divorced from this immemorial and funda- 
 mental conception of slavery ; to that conception, to 
 that institution, our Industrial or Capitalist society 
 is now upon its return. We are re-establishing the 
 slave. 
 
 Before proceeding to the proof of this, I shall, in 
 27 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 the next few pages, digress to sketch very briefly the 
 process whereby the old Pagan slavery was trans- 
 formed into a free society some centuries ago. I shall 
 then outline the further process whereby the new 
 non-servile society was wrecked at the Reformation 
 in certain areas of Europe, and particularly in Eng- 
 land. There was gradually produced in its stead the 
 transitory phase of society (now nearing its end) 
 called generally Capitalism or the Capitalist State. 
 
 Such a digression, being purely historical, is not 
 logically necessary to a consideration of our subject, 
 but it is of great value to the reader, because the 
 knowledge of how, in reality and in the concrete, 
 things have moved better enables us to understand 
 the logical process whereby they tend towards a par- 
 ticular goal in the future. 
 
 One could prove the tendency towards the Servile 
 State in modern England to a man who knew nothing 
 of the past of Europe ; but that tendency will seem 
 to him far more reasonably probable, far more a 
 matter of experience and lessamatter of mere deduc- 
 tion, when he knows what our society once was, and 
 how it changed into what we know to-day. 
 
SECTION TWO 
 
 OUR CIVILISATION WAS 
 ORIGINALLY SERVILE 
 
SECTION TWO OUR CIVIL- 
 
 ISATION WAS ORIGINALLY SERVILE 
 
 IN NO MATTER WHAT FIELD OF THE 
 European past we make our research, we find, from 
 two thousand years ago upwards, one fundamental 
 institution whereupon the whole of society reposes; 
 that fundamental institution is Slavery. 
 
 There is here no distinction between the highly 
 civilised City-State of the Mediterranean, with its 
 letters, its plastic art, and its code of laws, with all 
 thatmakes acivilisation — and thisstretchingback far 
 beyond any surviving record, — there is here no dis- 
 tinction between that civilised body and the Northern 
 and Western societies of the Celtic tribes, or of the 
 little known hordes that wandered in the Germanies. 
 ^//indifferently reposed upon slavery. It was a fun- 
 damental conception of society. It was everywhere 
 present, nowhere disputed. 
 
 There is a distinction (or would appear to be) be- 
 tween Europeans and Asiatics in this matter. The 
 religion and morals of the one so differed in their 
 very origin from those of the other that every social 
 institution was touched by the contrast — and Slavery 
 among the rest. 
 
 But with that we need not concern ourselves. My 
 point is that our European ancestry, those men from 
 whom we are descended and whose blood runs with 
 little admixture in our veins, took slavery for granted, 
 made of it the economic pivot upon which the pro- 
 3i 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 duction of wealth should turn, and never doubted 
 but that it was normal to all human society. 
 
 It is a matter of capital importance to seize this. 
 
 An arrangement of such a sort would not have en- 
 dured without intermission(and indeed withoutques- 
 tion) for many centuries, nor have been found emerg- 
 ing fully grown from that vast space of unrecorded 
 time during which barbarism and civilisation flour- 
 ished side by sidein Europe, had there notbeen some- 
 thing in it, good or evil, native to our blood. 
 
 There was no question in those ancient societies 
 from which we spring of making subject races into 
 slavesbythemightofconqueringraces. All that is the 
 guess-work of the universities. Not only is there no 
 proof of it, rather all the existing proof is the other 
 way. The Greek had a Greek slave, the Latin a Latin 
 slave, the German a German slave, the Celt a Celtic 
 slave. The theory that " superior races " invading a 
 land either drove out the original inhabitants or re- 
 duced them to slavery, is one which has no argument 
 either from our present knowledge of man's mind or 
 from recorded evidence. Indeed, the most striking 
 feature of that Servile Basis upon which Paganism 
 reposed was the human equality recognised between 
 master and slave. The master might kill the slave, 
 but both were of one race and each was human to the 
 other. 
 
 This spiritual value was not, as a further pernicious 
 
 32 
 
OUR SERVILE CIVILISATION 
 
 piece of guess-work would dream, a " growth " or a 
 " progress." The doctrine of human equality was in- 
 herent in the very stuff of antiquity, as it is still in- 
 herent in societies which have not lost tradition. 
 
 We may presume that the barbarian of the North 
 would grasp the great truth with less facility than the 
 civilised man of the Mediterranean, because barbar- 
 ism everywhere shows a retrogression in intellectual 
 power ; but the proof that the Servile Institution was 
 a social arrangement rather than a distinction of type 
 is patent from thecoincidenceevery where of Emanci- 
 pation with Slavery. Pagan Europe not only thought 
 the existence of Slaves a natural necessity to society, 
 but equally thought that upon giving a Slave his 
 freedom the enfranchised man would naturally step, 
 though perhaps after the interval of some lineage, 
 into the ranks of free society. Great poets and great 
 artists, statesmen and soldiers were little troubled by 
 the memory of a servile ancestry. 
 
 On the other hand, there was a perpetual recruit- 
 ment of the Servile Institution,just as there wasa per- 
 petual emancipation from it, proceeding year after 
 year ; and the natural or normal method of recruit- 
 ment is most clearly apparent to us in the simple and 
 barbaric societies which the observation of contem- 
 porary civilised Pagans enables us to judge. 
 ~wt was poverty that made the slave. 
 
 Prisoners of war taken in set combat afforded one 
 33 3 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 mode of recruitment, and there was also the raiding 
 of men by pirates in the outer lands and the selling 
 of them in the slave markets of the South. But at 
 once the cause of the recruitment and the permanent 
 support of theinstitution of slavery was the indigence 
 of the man who sold himself into slavery, or was born 
 into it; for it was a rule of Pagan Slavery that the 
 slavebredtheslave.and that even if one of the parents 
 were free the offspring was a slave. 
 
 The society of antiquity, therefore, was normally 
 divided (as must at last be the society of any servile 
 state)intoclearlymarked sections: there was uponthe 
 one hand the citizen who had avoice in the conductot 
 the State, who would often labour — but labour of his 
 own free will — and who was normally possessed of 
 property ; upon the other hand, there was a mass dis- 
 possessed of the means of production and compelled 
 by positive law to labour at comnjiand. 
 
 It istruethat in the further developments of society 
 the accumulation of private savings by a slave was 
 tolerated and that slaves so favoured did sometimes 
 purchase their freedom. 
 
 It is further true that in the confusion of the last 
 generations of Paganism there arose in some of the 
 great cities a considerable class of men who, though 
 free, were dispossessed of the means of production. 
 But these last never existed in a sufficient propor- 
 tion to stamp the whole State of society with a char- 
 
 34 
 
OUR SERVILE CIVILISATION 
 
 acter drawn from their proletarian circumstance. To 
 the end the Pagan world remained a world of free 
 proprietors possessed, in various degrees, of the land 
 and of the capital whereby wealth may be produced, 
 and applying to that land and capital for the pur- 
 pose of producing wealth, compulsory labour. 
 
 Certain features in that original Servile State from 
 which we all spring should be carefully noted by way 
 of conclusion. 
 
 First, though all nowadays contrast slavery with 
 freedom to the advantage of the latter, yet men then 
 accepted slavery freely as an alternative to indigence. 
 
 Secondly (and this is most important for our judg- 
 ment of the Servile Institution as a whole, and of the 
 chances of its return), in all those centuries we find 
 no organised effort, nor (what is still more significant) 
 do we find any complaint of conscience against the in- 
 stitution which condemned the bulk of human beings 
 to forced labour. 
 
 Slaves may be found in the literary exercises of the 
 time bewailing their lot — and joking about it ; some 
 philosophers will complain that an ideal societyshould 
 contain no slaves ; others will excuse the establish- 
 ment of slavery upon this plea or that, while granting 
 that it offends the dignity of man. The greater part 
 will argue of the State that it is necessarily Servile. 
 But no one, slave or free, dreams of abolishing or 
 even of changing the thing. You have no martyrs for 
 35 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 the case of " freedom " as against '' slavery." The so- 
 called Servile wars are the resistance on the part of 
 escaped slaves to any attempt at recapture, but they 
 are not accompanied by an accepted affirmation that 
 servitudeisan intolerablething; noristhatnotestruck 
 at all from the unknown beginnings to the Catho- 
 lic endings of the Pagan world. Slavery is irksome, 
 undignified, woeful ; but it is, to them, of the nature 
 of things. 
 
 You may say, to be brief, that this arrangement 
 of society was the very air which Pagan Antiquity 
 breathed. 
 
 Its great works, its leisure and its domestic life, 
 its humour, its reserves of power, all depend upon the 
 fact that its society was that of the Servile State. 
 
 Men were happy in that arrangement, or, at least, 
 as happy as men ever are. 
 
 The attempt to escape byapersonal effort, whether 
 of thrift, of adventure, or of flattery to a master, from 
 the Servile condition had never even so much of driv- 
 ing power behind it as the attempt many show to-day 
 to escape from the rank of wage-earners to those of 
 employers. Servitude did not seem a hell into which 
 a man would rather die than sink, or out of which 
 at any sacrifice whatsoever a man would raise him- 
 self. It was a condition accepted by those who suf- 
 fered it as much as by those who enjoyedit, and a per- 
 fectly necessary part of all that men did affcl thought. 
 
 36 
 
OUR SERVILE CIVILISATION 
 
 You find no barbarian from some free place aston- 
 ished at the institution of Slavery ; you find no Slave 
 pointing to a society in which Slavery was unknown 
 as towards a happier land. To our ancestors not only 
 for those few centuries during which we have record 
 of their actions, but apparently during an illimitable 
 past, the division of society into those who must work 
 under compulsion and those who would benefit by 
 their labour was the very plan of the State — apart 
 from which they could hardly think of society as 
 existing at all. 
 
 Let all this be clearly grasped. It is fundamental 
 to an understanding of the problem before us. Slav- 
 ery is no novel experience in the history of Europe ; 
 nor is one suffering an odd dream when one talks of 
 Slavery as acceptable to European men. Slavery 
 was of the very stuff of Europe for thousands upon 
 thousands of years, until Europe engaged upon that 
 considerable moral experiment called The Faith, 
 which many believe to be now accomplished and dis- 
 carded, and in the failure of which it would seem that 
 the old and primary institution of Slavery must return. 
 
 For there came upon us Europeans, after all those 
 centuries.andcenturiesof asettled social order which 
 was erected upon Slavery as upon a sure foundation, 
 the experiment called the Christian Church. 
 
 Among the by-products of this experiment, very 
 slowly emerging from the old Pagan world, and not 
 37 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 long completed before Christendom itself suffered 
 a shipwreck, was the exceedingly gradual transfor- 
 mation of the Servile State into something other : 
 a society of owners. And how that something other 
 did proceed from the Pagan Servile State I will next 
 explain. 
 
SECTION THREE 
 
 HOW THE SERVILE INSTITU- 
 TION WAS FOR A TIME 
 DISSOLVED 
 
SECTION THE THIRD 
 
 HOW THE SERVILE INSTITUTION 
 WAS FOR A TIME DISSOLVED 
 
 THE PROCESS BY WHICH SLAVERY 
 disappeared among Christian men, though very leng- 
 thy in its development (it covered close upon a thou- 
 sand years), and though exceedingly complicated in 
 its detail, may be easily and briefly grasped in its main 
 lines. 
 
 Let it first be clearly understood that the vast re- 
 volution through which the European mind passed 
 between thefirst and the fourth centuries(thatrevolu- 
 tion which is often termed the Conversion of the World 
 to Christianity, but which should for purposes of his- 
 torical accuracy be called the Growth of the Church) 
 included no attack upon the Servile Institution. 
 
 No dogma of the Church pronounced Slavery to 
 be immoral, or the sale and purchase of men to be a 
 sin, or the imposition of compulsory labour upon a 
 Christian to be a contravention of any human right. 
 
 The emancipation of Slaves was indeed regarded 
 asagood workbythe Faithful: but so was it regarded 
 by the Pagan. It was, on the face of it, a service ren- 
 dered to one's fellowmen. The sale of Christians to 
 Pagan masters was abhorrent to the later empire of 
 the Barbarian Invasions, not because slavery in itself 
 was condemned, but because it was a sort of treason 
 to civilisation to force men away from Civilisation to 
 Barbarism. I n general you will discover no pronounce- 
 4i 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 ment against slavery as an institution, nor any moral 
 definition attacking it, throughout all those early 
 Christian centuries during which it none the less 
 effectively disappears. 
 
 The form of its disappearance is well worth noting. 
 It begins with the establishment as the fundamental 
 unit of production in Western Europe of those great 
 landedestates, commonly lying in thehandsofasingle 
 proprietor, and generally known as VlLL^E. 
 
 There were, of course, many other forms of human 
 agglomeration: small peasant farms owned in absol- 
 ute proprietorship by their petty masters; groups of 
 free men associated in what was called a Vicus; manu- 
 factories in which groups of slaves were industrially 
 organised to the profit of their master; and, govern- 
 ing the regions around them, the scheme of Roman 
 towns. 
 
 But of all these the Villawas the dominating type ; 
 and as society passed from the high civilisation of 
 the first four centuries into the simplicity of the Dark 
 Ages, the Villa, the unit of agricultural production, 
 became more and more the model of all society. 
 
 Now the Villa began as a considerable extent of 
 land, containing,likeamodern English estate.pasture, 
 arable, water, wood and heath, or waste land. It was 
 owned bya.domtnusorlordinabsolute proprietorship, 
 to sell, or leave by will, to do with it whatsoever he 
 chose. It was cultivated for him by Slaves to whom 
 
 42 
 
THE SERVILE DISSOLVED 
 
 he owed nothing in return, and whom it was simply 
 his interest to keep alive and to continue breeding in 
 order that they might perpetuate his wealth. 
 
 I concentrate particularly upon these Slaves, the 
 great majority of the human beings inhabiting the 
 land, because, although there arose in the Dark Ages, 
 when the Roman Empire was passing into the society 
 of the Middle Ages, other social elements within the 
 Villa — the Freed men who owed the lord a modified 
 service, and even occasionally independent citizens 
 present through a contract terminable and freely en- 
 tered into — yet it is the Slave who is the mark of all 
 that society. 
 
 At its origin, then, the Roman Villa was a piece of 
 absolute property, the production of wealth upon 
 which was due to the application of slave labour to 
 the natural resources of the place; and that slave 
 labour was as much the property of the lord as was 
 the land itself. 
 
 The first modification which this arrangement 
 showed in the new society which accompanied the 
 growth and establishment of the Church in the Roman 
 world, was a sort of customary rule which modified 
 the old arbitrary position of the Slave. 
 
 The Slave was still a Slave, but it was both more 
 convenient in thedecay of communications and public 
 power, and more consonant with the social spirit of 
 the time to make sure of that Slave's produce by ask- 
 43 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 ing him for no more than certain customary dues. 
 The Slave and his descendants became more or less 
 rooted to one spot. Some were still bought and sold, 
 but in decreasing numbers. As the generations pass- 
 ed a larger and a larger proportion lived where and 
 as their fathers had lived, and the produce which 
 they raised was fixed more and more at a certain a- 
 mount, which the lord was content to receive and ask 
 no more. The arrangement was made workable by 
 leaving to the Slave all the remaining produce of his 
 own labour. Therewasasort of implied bargain here, 
 in the absence of public powers and in the decline of 
 the old highly centralised and vigorous system which 
 could always guarantee to the master the full product 
 of the Slave's effort. The bargain implied was, that 
 if the Slave Community of the Villa would produce 
 for the benefit of its Lord not less than a certain cus- 
 tomary amount of goods from the soil of the Villa, 
 the Lord could count on their always exercising that 
 effort by leaving to them all the surplus, which they 
 could increase, if they willed, indefinitely. 
 
 By the ninth century, when this process had been 
 gradually at work for a matter of some three hundred 
 years, one fixed form of productive unit began to be 
 apparent throughout Western Christendom. 
 
 The old absolutely owned estate had come to be 
 divided into three portions. One of thesewas pasture 
 and arable land, reserved privately to the lord, and 
 
 44 
 
THE SERVILE DISSOLVED 
 
 called domain : that is, lord's land. Another was in 
 the occupation, and already almost in the possession 
 (practically , though not legally), of thosewho had once 
 been Slaves. A third was common land over which 
 both the Lord and the Slave exercised each their var- 
 ious rights, which rights were minutely remembered 
 and held sacred by custom. For instance, in a certain 
 village, if there was beech pasture for three hundred 
 swine, the lord might put in but fifty : two hundred 
 and fifty were the rights of the " village." 
 
 Upon the first of these portions, Domain, wealth 
 was produced by the obedience of the Slave for cer- 
 tain fixed hours of labour. He must come so many 
 days a week, or upon such and such occasions (all 
 fixed and customary), to till the land of the Domain 
 for his Lord, and «//the produce of this must be hand- 
 ed over to the Lord — though, of course, a daily wage 
 in kind was allowed, for the labourer must live. 
 
 Upon the second portion, " Land in Villenage," 
 which was nearly always the most of the arable and 
 pasture land of the Villcz, the Slaves worked by rules 
 and customs which they gradually came to elaborate 
 for themselves. They worked under an officer of their 
 own, sometimes nominated, sometimes elected: near- 
 ly always, in practice, a man suitable to them and more 
 or less of their choice ; though this co-operative work 
 upon the old Slave-ground was controlled by the 
 general customs of the village, common to lord and 
 
 45 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 slave alike, and the principal officer over both kinds 
 of land was the Lord's Steward. 
 
 Of the wealth so produced by the Slaves, a certain 
 fixed portion (estimated originally in kind) was pay- 
 able to the Lord's Bailiff, and became the property 
 of the Lord. 
 
 Finally, on the third division of the land, the 
 " Waste," the " Wood," the " Heath," and certain com- 
 mon pastures, wealth was produced as elsewhere by 
 the labour of those who had once been the Slaves, 
 but divided in customary proportions between them 
 and their master. Thus, such and such a water mea- 
 dow would have grazing for so many oxen ; the num- 
 ber was rigidly defined, and of that number so many 
 would be the Lord's and so many the Villagers'. 
 
 During the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries this 
 system crystallised and became so natural in men's 
 eyes that the original servile character of the working 
 folk upon the Villa was forgotten. 
 
 The documents of the time are rare. These three 
 centuries are the crucible of Europe, and record is 
 drowned and burnt in them. Our study of their so- 
 cial conditions, especially in the latter part, are mat- 
 ter rather of inference than of direct evidence. But 
 the sale and purchase of men, already exceptional at 
 the beginning of this period, is almost unknown be- 
 fore the end of it. Apart from domestic slaves with- 
 in the household.slavery in the old sensewhich Pagan 
 
 46 
 
THE SERVILE DISSOLVED 
 
 antiquity gave that institution had been transformed 
 out of all knowledge, and when, with the eleventh 
 century, the true Middle Ages begin to spring from 
 the soil of the Dark Ages, and a new civilisation to 
 arise, though theold word servus (theLatm for a slave) 
 is still used for the man who works the soil, his status 
 in the now increasing number of documents which we 
 can consult is wholly changed ; we can certainly no 
 longer translate the word by the English word slave; 
 we are compelled to translate it by a new word with 
 very different connotations : the word serf. 
 
 The Serf of the early Middle Ages, of the eleventh 
 and early twelfth centuries, of the Crusades and 
 the Norman Conquest, is already nearly a peasant. 
 He is indeed bound in legal theory to the soil upon 
 which he was born. In social practice, all that is re- 
 quired of him is that his family should till its quota 
 of servile land, and that the dues to the lord shall 
 not fail from absence of labour. That duty fulfilled, 
 it is easy and common for members of the serf-class 
 to enter the professions and the Church, or to go 
 wild ; to become men practically free in the grow- 
 ing industries of the towns. With every passing 
 generation the ancient servile conception of the lab- 
 ourer's status grows more and more dim, and the 
 Courts and the practice of society treat him more and 
 more as a man strictly bound to certain dues and to 
 certain periodical labour within his industrial unit, 
 47 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 but in all other respects free. 
 
 As the civilisation of the Middle Ages develops, as 
 wealth increases and the arts progressively flourish, 
 this character of freedom becomes more marked. In 
 spite of attempts in time of scarcity (as after a plague) 
 to insist upon the old rights to compulsory labour, the 
 habitof commutingthese rights for money-payments 
 and dues has grown too strong to be resisted. 
 
 If at the end of the fourteenth century, let us say, 
 or at the beginning of the fifteenth, you had visited 
 some Squire upon his estate in France or in England, 
 he would have told you of the whole of it, " These 
 are my lands." But the peasant (as he now was) 
 would have said also of his holding, " This is my 
 land." He could not be evicted from it. The dues 
 which he was customarily bound to pay were but a 
 fraction of its total produce. He could not always 
 sell it, but it was always inheritable from father to 
 son ; and, in general, at the close of this long process 
 of a thousand years the Slave had become a free man 
 for all the ordinary purposes of society. He bought 
 and sold. He saved as he willed, he invested, he built, 
 he drained at his discretion, and if he improved the 
 land it was to his own profit. 
 
 Meanwhile, side by side with this emancipation of 
 mankind in the direct line of descent from the old 
 chattel slaves of the Roman villa went, in the Middle 
 Ages, a crowd of institutions which all similarly made 
 
 48 
 
THE SERVILE DISSOLVED 
 
 for a distribution of property, and for the destruction 
 of even the fossil remnants of a then forgotten Servile 
 State. Thus industry of every kind in the towns, in 
 transport, in crafts, and in commerce, was organised 
 intheform of Guilds. And a Guild was asociety part- 
 ly co-operative, but in the main composed of private 
 owners of capital whose corporation was self-govern- 
 ing, and was designed to check competition between 
 its members : to prevent the growth of one at the ex- 
 pense of the other. Above all, most jealously did the 
 Guild safeguard the division of property, so that 
 there should be formed within its ranks no proletariat 
 upon the one side, and no monopolising capitalist 
 upon the other. 
 
 There was a period of apprenticeship at a man's 
 entry into a Guild, during which he worked for a 
 master ; but in time he became a master in his turn. 
 The existence of such corporations as the normal 
 units of industrial production, of commercial effort, 
 and of the means of transport.isproof enough of what 
 the social spirit was which had also enfranchised the 
 labourer upon the land. And while such institutions 
 flourished side by side with the no longer servile 
 village communities, freehold or absolute possession 
 of the soil, as distinguished from the tenure of the 
 serf under the lord, also increased. 
 
 These three forms under which labour was exer- 
 cised — the serf, secure in his position, and burdened 
 49 4 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 only with regular dues, which were but a fraction of 
 his produce j the freeholder, a man independent save 
 for money dues, which were more of a tax than a rent; 
 the Guild, in which well-divided capital worked co- 
 operatively for craft production, for transport and for 
 commerce — all three between them were making for 
 a society which should be based upon the principle of 
 property. All, or most, — the normal family — should 
 own. And on ownership the freedom of the State 
 should repose. 
 
 The State, as the minds of men envisaged it at the 
 close of this process, was an agglomeration of families 
 of varying wealth, but by far the greater number 
 owners of the means of production. It was an agglo- 
 meration in which the stability of this distributive 
 system (as I have called it) was guaranteed by the 
 existence of co-operative bodies, binding men of the 
 same craft or of the same village together ; guaran- 
 teeing the small proprietor against loss of his econo- 
 mic independence, while at the same time it guaran- 
 teed society against the growth of a proletariat. If 
 liberty of purchase and of sale, of mortgage and of 
 inheritance was restricted, it was restricted with the 
 social object of preventing the growth of an economic 
 oligarchy which could exploit the rest of the com- 
 munity. The restraints upon liberty were restraints 
 designed for the preservation of liberty ; and every 
 action of Mediaeval Society, from the flower of the 
 
 SO 
 
THE SERVILE DISSOLVED 
 
 Middle Ages to the approach of their catastrophe, 
 was directed towards the establishment of a State in 
 which men should be economically free through the 
 possession of capital and of land. 
 
 Save here and there in legal formulae, or in rare 
 patches isolated and eccentric, the Servile Institution 
 had totally disappeared; normust it be imagined that 
 anything in the nature of Collectivism had replaced 
 it. There was common land, but it was common land 
 jealously guarded by men who were also personal pro- 
 prietors of other land. Common property in the vil- 
 lage was but one of the forms of property, and was 
 used rather as the fly-wheel to preserve the regularity 
 of the co-operative machine than as a type of holding 
 in any way peculiarly sacred. The Guilds had pro- 
 perty in common, but that property was the property 
 necessary to their co-operative life: their Halls, their 
 Funds for Relief, their Religious Endowments. As 
 for the instruments of their trades, those instruments 
 were owned by the individual members, not by the 
 guild, save where they were of so expensive a kind as 
 to necessitate a corporate control. 
 
 Such was the transformation which had come over 
 European society in the courseof ten Christian centur- 
 ies. Slavery had gone, and in its place had come that 
 establishment of free possession whichseemedsonor- 
 mal to men, and so consonant to a happy human life. 
 No particular name was then found for it. To-day, 
 
 5i 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 and now that it has disappeared, we must construct 
 an awkward one, and say that the Middle Ages had 
 instinctively conceived and brought into existence 
 the Distributive State. 
 
 That excellent consummation of human society 
 passed, as we know, and was in certain Provinces of 
 Europe, but more particularly in Britain, destroyed. 
 
 For a society in which the determinant mass of 
 families were owners of capital and of land; for one 
 in which production was regulated by self-governing 
 corporations of small owners ; and for one in which 
 the misery and insecurity of a proletariat was un- 
 known, there came to be substituted the dreadful 
 moral anarchy against which all moral effort is now 
 turned, and which goes by the name of Capitalism. 
 
 How did such a catastrophe come about ? Why 
 was it permitted, and upon what historical process 
 did the evil batten ? What turned an England eco- 
 nomically free into the England which we know to- 
 day, of which at least one-third is indigent, of which 
 nineteen-twentieths are dispossessed of capital and 
 of land, and of which the whole industry and national 
 life is controlled upon its economic side by a few 
 chance directors of millions, a few masters of unsocial 
 and irresponsible monopolies? 
 
 The answer most usually given to this fundamental 
 question in our history, and the one most readily ac- 
 cepted, is that this misfortune came about through a 
 
 52 
 
THE SERVILE DISSOLVED 
 
 material process known as the Industrial Revolution. 
 The use of expensive machinery, the concentration 
 of industry and of its implements are imagined to 
 have enslaved, in some blind way, apart from the 
 human will, the action of English mankind. 
 
 The explanation is wholly false. No such material 
 cause determined the degradation from which we 
 suffer. 
 
 It was the deliberate action of men, evil will in a 
 few and apathy of will among the many, which pro- 
 duced a catastrophe as human in its causes and in- 
 ception as in its vile effect. 
 
 Capitalism was not the growth of the industrial 
 movement, nor of chance material discoveries. A 
 little acquaintance with history and a little straight- 
 forwardness in the teaching of it would be enough 
 to prove that. 
 
 The Industrial System was a growth proceeding 
 from Capitalism, not its cause. Capitalism was here 
 in England before the Industrial System came into 
 being ; — before the use of coal and of the new ex- 
 pensive machinery, and of the concentration of the 
 implements of production in the great towns. Had 
 Capitalism not been present before the Industrial 
 Revolution, that revolution might have proved as 
 beneficent to Englishmen as it has proved malefi- 
 cent. But Capitalism — that is, the ownership by a 
 few of the springs of life — was present long before the 
 53 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 great discoveries came. It warped the effect of these 
 discoveries and new inventions, and it turned them 
 from a good into an evil thing. It was not machinery 
 that lost us our freedom ; it was the loss of a free 
 mind. 
 
SECTION FOUR 
 
 HOW THE DISTRIBUTIVE 
 STATE FAILED 
 
SECTION THE FOURTH HOW 
 
 THE DISTRIBUTIVE STATE FAILED 
 
 WITH THE CLOSE OF THE MIDDLE AGES 
 the societies of Western Christendom and England 
 among the rest were economically free. 
 
 Property was an institution native to the State and 
 enjoyed by the great mass of its citizens. Co-opera- 
 tive institutions, voluntary regulations of labour, re- 
 stricted the completely independent use of property 
 by its owners only in order to keep that institution 
 intactandto prevent the absorption of small property 
 by great. 
 
 This excellent state of affairs which we had reached 
 after many centuries of Christian development, and 
 in which the old institution of slavery had been finally 
 eliminated from Christendom, did not everywhere 
 survive. In England in particular it was ruined. The 
 seeds of the disaster were sown in the sixteenth cen- 
 tury. Its first apparent effects came to light in the 
 seventeenth. During the eighteenth century Eng- 
 land came to be finally, though insecurely, establish- 
 ed upon a proletarian basis, that is, it had already be- 
 come a society of rich men possessed of the means 
 of production on the one hand, and a majority dis- 
 possessed of those means upon the other. With the 
 nineteenth century the evil plant had come to its 
 maturity, and England had become before the close 
 of that period a purely Capitalist State, the type 
 and model of Capitalism for the whole world : with 
 
 57 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 the means of production tightly held by a very small 
 group of citizens, and the whole determining mass 
 of the nation dispossessed of capital and land, and 
 dispossessed, therefore, in all cases of security, and 
 in many of sufficiency as well. The mass of English- 
 men, still possessed of political, lacked more and 
 more the elements of economic, freedom, and were in 
 a worse posture than free citizens have ever found 
 themselves before in the history of Europe. 
 
 By what steps did so enormous a catastrophe fall 
 upon us? 
 
 The first step in the process consisted in the mis- 
 handling of a great economic revolution which mark- 
 ed the sixteenth century. The lands and the accumu- 
 lated wealth of the monasteries were taken out of 
 the hands of their old possessors with the intention 
 of vesting them in the Crown — but they passed, as 
 a fact, not into the hands of the Crown, but into the 
 hands of an already wealthy section of the community 
 who, after the change was complete, became in the 
 succeeding hundred years the governing power of 
 England. 
 
 This is what happened : — 
 
 The England of the early sixteenth century, the 
 England over which Henry VI 1 1. inherited his power- 
 ful Crown in youth, though it was an England in 
 which the great mass of men owned the land they 
 tilled and the houses in which they dwelt, and the im- 
 
 58 
 
THE DISTRIBUTIVE FAILED 
 
 plements with which they worked, was yet an Eng- 
 land in which these goods, though widely distributed, 
 were distributed unequally. 
 
 Then, as now, the soil and its fixtures werethe basis 
 of all wealth, but the proportion between the value of 
 the soil and its fixtures and the value of other means 
 of production (implements, stores of clothing and of 
 subsistence, etc.) was different from what it is now. 
 The land and the fixtures upon it formed a very much 
 larger fraction of the totality of the means of produc- 
 tion than they do to-day. They represent to-day not 
 one-half the totalmeans of production of this country; 
 and though they are the necessary foundation for all 
 wealth production, yet our great machines, our stores 
 of food and clothing, our coal and oil, our ships and 
 the rest of it, come to more than the true value of 
 the land and of the fixtures upon the land : they come 
 to more than the arable soil and the pasture, the con- 
 structional valueofthe houses, wharves and docks,and 
 so forth. In the early sixteenth century the land and 
 the fixtures upon it came, upon the contrary, to very 
 much more than all other forms of wealth combined. 
 
 Now this form of wealth was here, more than in 
 any other Western European country, already in the 
 hands of a wealthy land-owning class at the end of 
 the Middle Ages. 
 
 It is impossible to give exact statistics, because 
 none were gathered, and we can only make general 
 59 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 statements based upon inference and research. But, 
 roughly speaking, we may say that of the total value 
 of the land and its fixtures, probably rather more 
 than a quarter, though less than a third, was in the 
 hands of this wealthy class. 
 
 The England of that day was mainly agricultural, 
 and consisted of more than four, but less than six 
 million people, and in every agricultural community 
 you would have the Lord,as he was legally called (the 
 squire, as he was already conversationally termed), 
 in possession of more demesne land than in any 
 other country. On the average you found him, I say, 
 owning in this absolute fashion rather more than a 
 quarter, perhaps a third of the land of the village : 
 in the towns the distribution was more even. Some- 
 times it was a private individual who was in this posi- 
 tion, sometimes a corporation, but in every village 
 you would have found this demesne land absolutely 
 owned by the political head of the village, occupying 
 a considerable proportion of its acreage. The rest, 
 though distributed as property among the less for- 
 tunate of the population, and carrying with it houses 
 and implements from which they could not be dis- 
 possessed, paid certain dues to the Lord, and, what 
 was more, the Lord exercised local justice. This class 
 of wealthy land-owners had been also for now one 
 hundred years the Justices upon whom local ad- 
 ministration depended. 
 
 60 
 
THE DISTRIBUTIVE FAILED 
 
 There was no reason why this state of affairs should 
 not gradually have led to the rise of the Peasant 
 and the decay of the Lord. That is what happened 
 in France, and it might perfectly well have happened 
 here. A peasantry eager to purchase might have ' 
 gradually extended their holdings at the expense of 
 the demesne land, and to the distribution of property, 
 which was already fairly complete, there might have 
 been added another excellent element, namely, the 
 more equal possession of that property. But any 
 such process of gradual buying by the small man 
 from the great, such as would seem natural to the 
 temper of us European people, and such as has since 
 taken place nearly everywhere in countries which 
 were left free to act upon their popular instincts, was 
 interrupted in this country by an artificial revolution 
 of the most violent kind. This artificial revolution 
 consisted in the seizing of the monastic lands by the 
 Crown. 
 
 It is important to grasp clearly the nature of this 
 operation, for the whole economic future of England 
 was to flow from it. 
 
 Of the demesne lands, and the power of local ad- 
 ministration which they carried with them (a very 
 important feature, as we shall see later), rather more 
 than a quarter were in the hands of the Church ; the 
 Church was therefore the "Lord "of something over 
 25 per cent., say 28 per cent, or perhaps nearly 30 
 61 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 per cent., of English agricultural communities, and 
 the overseers of a like proportion of all English agri- 
 cultural produce. The Church was further the ab- 
 solute owner in practice of something like 30 per 
 cent, of the demesne land in the villages, and the re- 
 ceiver of something like 30 per cent, of the custom- 
 ary dues, etc., paid by the smaller owners to the 
 greater. All this economic power lay until 1535 in 
 the hands of Cathedral Chapters, communities of 
 monks and nuns, educational establishments con- 
 ducted by the clergy, and so forth. 
 
 When the Monastic lands were confiscated by 
 Henry VIII., not the whole of this vast economic 
 influence was suddenly extinguished. The secular 
 clergy remained endowed, and most of the educa- 
 tional establishments, though looted, retained some 
 revenue ; but though the whole 30 per cent, did not 
 suffer confiscation, something well over 20 per cent, 
 did, and the revolution effected by this vast opera- 
 tion was by far the most complete, the most sudden, 
 and the most momentous of any that has taken place 
 in the economic history of any European people. 
 
 It was at first intended to retain this great mass of 
 the means of production in the hands of the Crown : 
 that must be clearly remembered by any student of 
 the fortunes of England, and by all who marvel at the 
 contrast between the old England and the new. 
 
 Had that intention been firmly maintained, the 
 
 62 
 
THE DISTRIBUTIVE FAILED 
 
 English State and its government would have been 
 the most powerful in Europe. 
 
 The Executive (which in those days meant the 
 AT/wg - ) would havehad a greater opportunity for crush- 
 ing the resistance of the wealthy, for backing its 
 political power with economic power, and for order- 
 ing the social life of its subjects than any other ex- 
 ecutive in Christendom. 
 
 Had Henry VIII. and his successors kept the land 
 thus confiscated, the power of the French Monarchy, 
 at which we are astonished, would have been nothing 
 to the power of the English. 
 
 The King of England would have had in his own 
 hands an instrument of control of the most absolute ' 
 sort. He would presumably have used it, as a strong 
 central government always does, for the weakening 
 of the wealthier classes, and to the indirect advantage 
 of the mass of the people. Atanyrate,weshouldhave 
 a very different England indeed from the England 
 we know, if the King had held fast to his own after 
 the dissolution of the monasteries. 
 
 Now it is precisely here that the capital point in 
 this great revolution appears. The King failed to 
 keep the lands he had seized. That class of large land- 
 owners which already existed and controlled, as I 
 have said, anything from a quarter to a third of the 
 agricultural values of England, were too strong for 
 themonarchy. Theyinsistedupon land being granted 
 
 63 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 to themselves, sometimes freely, sometimes for ridi- 
 culously small sums ; and they were strong enough 
 in Parliament, and through the local administrative 
 power they held, to see that their demands were satis- 
 fied. Nothing that the Crown let go ever went back 
 to the Crown, and year after year more and more of 
 what had once been the mon astic land became the ab- 
 solute possession of the large land-owners. 
 
 Observe the effect of this. All over England men 
 who already held in virtually absolute property from 
 one-quarter to one-third of the soil and the ploughs 
 and the barns of a village, became possessed in a 
 very few years of a further great section of the means 
 of production, which turned the scale wholly in their 
 favour. They added to that third a new and extra 
 fifth. They became at a blow the owners of half the 
 land ! In many centres of capital importance they 
 had come to own more than half the land. They were 
 in many districts not only the unquestionedsuperiors, 
 but the economic masters of the rest of the commun- 
 ity. Theycouldbuyto the greatest advantage. They 
 were strictly competitive, getting every shilling of due 
 and of rent where the old clerical landlords had been 
 customary — leaving much to the tenant. They be- 
 gan to fill the universities, the judiciary. The Crown 
 less and less decided between great and small. More 
 and more the great could decide in their own favour. 
 They soon possessed by these operations the bulk of 
 
 64 
 
THE DISTRIBUTIVE FAILED 
 
 the means of production, and they immediately began 
 the process of eating up the small independent men 
 and gradually forming those great estates which, in 
 the course of a few generations, became identical with 
 the village itself. All over England you may notice 
 that the great squires' houses date from this revolu- 
 tion or after it. The manorial house, the house of 
 the local great man as it was in the Middle Ages, 
 survives here and there to show of what immense 
 effect this revolution was. The low timbered place 
 with its steadings and outbuildings, only a larger 
 farmhouse among the other farmhouses, is turned 
 after the Reformation and thenceforward into a pal- 
 ace. Save where great castles (which were only held 
 of the Crown and not owned) made an exception, the 
 pre-Reformation gentry lived as men richer than, but 
 not the masters of, other farmers around them. After 
 the Reformation there began to arise all over England 
 those great " country houses" which rapidly became 
 the typical centres of English agricultural life. 
 
 The process was in full swing before Henry died. 
 Unfortunately for England, he left as his heir a sickly 
 child, during the six years of whose reign, from 1 547 
 to 1553, the loot went on at an appalling rate. When 
 he died and Mary came to the throne it was nearly 
 completed. A mass of new families had arisen, 
 wealthy out of all proportion to anything which the 
 older England had known, and bound by a common 
 65 5 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 interest to the older families which had joined in the 
 grab. Every single man who sat in Parliament for 
 a country required his price for voting the dissolu- 
 tion of the monasteries ; every single man received 
 it. A list of the members of the Dissolution Parlia- 
 ment is enough to prove this, and, apart from their 
 power in Parliament, this class had a hundred other 
 ways of insisting on their will. The Howards(already 
 of some lineage), the Cavendishes, the Cecils, the 
 Russels, and fifty other new families thus rose upon 
 the ruins of religion ; and the process went steadily 
 on until, about one hundred years after its inception, 
 the whole face of England was changed. 
 
 In the place of a powerful Crown disposing of re- 
 venues far greater than that of any subject, you had 
 a Crown at its wit's end for money, and dominated 
 by subjects some of whom were its equals in wealth, 
 and who could, especially through the action of Par- 
 liament (which they now controlled), do much what 
 they willed with Government. 
 
 In other words, by the first third of the seventeenth 
 century, by 1630-40, the economic revolution was 
 finally accomplished, and the new economic reality 
 thrusting itself upon the old traditions of England 
 was a powerful oligarchy of largeowners overshadow- 
 ing an impoverished and dwindled monarchy. 
 
 Othercauses had contributed to this deplorable re- 
 sult. The change in the value of money had hit the 
 
 66 
 
THE DISTRIBUTIVE FAILED 
 
 Crown very hard ;* the peculiar history of the Tudor 
 family, their violent passions, their lack of resolution 
 and of any continuous policy, to some extent the 
 character of Charles I. himself, and many another 
 subsidiary cause may be quoted. But the great main 
 fact upon which the whole thing is dependent is the 
 fact that the Monastic Lands, at least a fifth of the 
 wealth of the country, had been transferred to the 
 great land-owners, and that this transference had 
 tipped the scale over entirely in their favour as against 
 the peasantry. 
 
 The diminished and impoverished Crown could no 
 longer stand. It fought against the new wealth the 
 struggle of the Civil Wars ; it was utterly defeated ; 
 and when a final settlement was arrived at in 1660 
 you have all the realities of power in the hands of a 
 small powerful class of wealthy men, the King still 
 surrounded by the forms and traditions of his old 
 power, but in practice a salaried puppet. And in 
 that social world which underlies all political appear- 
 ances, the great dominating note was that a few 
 wealthy families hadgothold of the bulk of themeans 
 
 * The purchasing power of money fell during this century to 
 about a third of its original standard. £3 (say) would purchase 
 under Charles I. the necessities which £1 would have pur- 
 chased under Henry VIII. Nearly all the receipts of the Crown 
 were customary. Most of its expenses were competitive. It 
 continued to get but £1 where it was gradually compelled to 
 pay out £3. 
 
 67 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 of production in England, while the same families 
 exercised all local administrative power and were 
 moreover the Judges, the Higher Education, the 
 Church, and the generals. They quite overshadowed 
 what was left of central government in this country. 
 
 Take, as a starting-point for what followed, the 
 date 1 700. By that time more than half of the English 
 were dispossessed of capital and of land. Not one 
 man in two,even if you reckon the very small owners, 
 inhabited a house of which he was the secure posses- 
 sor, or tilled land from which he could not be turned 
 off. 
 
 Such a proportion mayseem to us to-day a wonder- 
 fully free arrangement, and certainly if nearly one- 
 half of our population were possessed of the means 
 of production, we should be in a very different situa- 
 tion from that in which we find ourselves. But the 
 point to seize is that, though the bad business was 
 very far from completion in or about the year 1700, 
 yet by that date England had already become CAPI- 
 TALIST. She had already permitted a vast section of 
 her population to become proletarian, and it is this 
 and not the so-called " Industrial Revolution," a later 
 thing, which accounts for the terrible social condition 
 in which we find ourselves to-day. 
 
 How true this is what I still [have to say in this 
 section will prove. 
 
 In an England thus already cursed with a very 
 
 68 
 
THE DISTRIBUTIVE FAILED 
 
 large proletariat class, and in an England already 
 directed by a dominating Capitalist class, possessing 
 the means of production, there came a great indus- 
 trial development. 
 
 Had that industrial development come upon a 
 people economically free, it would have taken a co- 
 operative form. Coming as it did upon a people 
 which had already largely lost its economic freedom, 
 it took at its very origin a Capitalist form, and this 
 form it has retained, expanded, and perfected through- 
 out two hundred years. 
 
 It was in England thatthe Industrial System arose. 
 It was in England that all its traditions and habits 
 were formed ; and because the England in which it 
 arose was already a Capitalist England, modern In- 
 dustrialism, wherever you see it at work to-day, having 
 spread from England, has proceeded upon the Capi- 
 talist model. 
 
 It was in 1 705 that the first practical steam-engine, 
 Newcomen's, was set to work. The life of a man 
 elapsed before this invention was made, by Watt's 
 introduction of the condenser, into the great instru- 
 ment of production which has transformed our in- 
 dustry — but in those sixty years all the origins of the 
 Industrial Systemaretobediscovered. Itwas justbe- 
 fore Watt's patent that Hargreaves' spinning-jenny 
 appeared. Thirty years earlier, Abraham Darby of 
 Colebrook Dale, at the end of a long series of experi- 
 69 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 merits which had covered more than a century.smelted 
 iron-ore successfully with coke. Not twenty years 
 later, King introduced the flying shuttle, the first 
 great improvement in the hand-loom; and in general 
 the period covered by such a life as that ofDr Johnson, 
 born just after Newcomen's engine was first set work- 
 ing, and dying seventy-four years afterwards, when 
 the Industrial System was in full blast, covers that 
 great transformation of England. A man who, as a 
 child, could remember the last years of Queen Anne, 
 and who lived to the eve of the French Revolution, 
 saw passing before his eyes the change which trans- 
 formed English society and has led it to the expan- 
 sion and peril in which we see it to-day. 
 
 What was the characteristic mark of that half-cen- 
 tury and more ? Why did the new inventions give us 
 the form of society now known and hated under the 
 name of Industrial? Why did the vast increase in the 
 powers of production, in population and in accumu- 
 lation of wealth, turn the mass of Englishmen into a 
 poverty-stricken proletariat, cut off the rich from the 
 rest of the nation, and develop to the full all the evils 
 which we associate with the Capitalist State ? 
 
 To that question an answer almost as universal as 
 it is unintelligent has been given. That answer is 
 not only unintelligent but false, and it will be my busi- 
 ness here to show how false it is. The answer so pro- 
 vided in innumerable text-books, and taken almost 
 
 70 
 
THE DISTRIBUTIVE FAILED 
 
 as a commonplace in our universities, is that the new 
 methods of production — the new machinery, the new 
 implements — fatally and of themselves developed a 
 Capitalist State in which a few should own the means 
 of production and the mass should be proletarian. 
 The new instruments, it is pointed out, were on so 
 vastly greater a scale than the old, and were so much 
 ^nore expensive, that the small man could not afford 
 them ; while the rich man, who could afford them, ate 
 up by his competition, and reduced from the position 
 of a small owner to that of a wage-earner, his insuffi- 
 ciently equipped competitor who still attempted to 
 struggle on with the older and cheaper tools. To this 
 (we are told) the advantages of concentration were 
 added in favour of the large owner against the small. 
 Not only were the new instruments expensive almost 
 in proportion to their efficiency, but, especially after 
 the introduction of steam, they were efficient in pro- 
 portion to their concentration in few places and under 
 the direction of a few men. Under the effect of such 
 false arguments as these we have been taught to be- 
 lieve that the horrors of the Industrial System were a 
 blind and necessary product of material and imperson- 
 al forces, and that wherever the steam engine, the pow- 
 er loom, the blast furnace and the rest were introduc- 
 ed, therefatally would soon appearalittlegroupofow- 
 ners exploiting a vast majority of the dispossessed. 
 It is astonishing that a statement so unhistorical 
 7i 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 should have gained so general a credence. Indeed, 
 were the main truths of English history taught in our 
 schools and universities to-day, were educated men 
 familiar with the determining and major facts of the 
 national past,suchfollies could never have taken root. 
 The vast growth of the proletariat, the concentration 
 of ownership into the hands of a few owners, and the 
 exploitation by those owners of the mass of the com- 
 munity.had no fatal or necessary connection with the 
 discovery of new and perpetuallyimproving methods 
 of production. The evil proceeded in direct historical 
 sequence, proceeded patently and demonstrably, from 
 the fact that England, the seed-plot of the Industrial 
 System, was already captured by a wealthy oligarchy 
 before the series of great discoveries began. 
 
 Considerin what way the Industrial System develop- 
 ed upon Capitalist lines. Why were a fewrich menput 
 with such ease into possession of the new methods? 
 Why was it normal and natural in their eyes and in 
 that of con tem porary society that those who produced 
 the new wealth with the new machinery should be 
 proletarian and dispossessed ? Simply because the 
 England upon which the new discoveries had come 
 was already an England owned as to its soil and ac- 
 cumulations of wealth by a small minority : it was 
 already an England in which perhaps half of the whole 
 population was proletarian, and a medium for exploit- 
 ation ready to hand. 
 
 72 
 
THE DISTRIBUTIVE FAILED 
 
 When any one of the new industries was launched 
 it had to be capitalised; that is, accumulated wealth 
 fromsomesourceorotherhadto be found which would 
 support labour in the process of production until that 
 process should be complete. Someone must find the 
 corn and the meat and the housing and the clothing 
 by which should besupported, between the extraction 
 of the raw material and the moment when the con- 
 sumption of the finished article could begin, thehuman 
 agents which dealt with that raw material and turned 
 it into the finished product. Had property been well 
 distributed, protected by co-operative guilds, fenced 
 round and supported bycustom andby the autonomy 
 of great artisan corporations, those accumulations of 
 wealth, necessary for the launching of each new me- 
 thod of production and for each new perfection of it, 
 would have been discovered in the mass of small own- 
 ers. Their corporations, their little parcels of wealth 
 combined would have furnished the capitalisation re- 
 quired for the new processes,and men already owners 
 would, as one invention succeeded another, have in- 
 creased the total wealth of the community without 
 disturbing the balance of distribution. There is no 
 conceivable link in reason or in experience which binds 
 the capitalisation of a new process with the idea of a 
 few employing owners and a mass of employed non- 
 owners working at a wage. Such great discoveries 
 coming in a society like that of the thirteenth century 
 73 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 would have blest and enriched mankind. Corningupon 
 the diseased moral conditions of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury in this country, they proved a curse. 
 
 To whom could the new industry turn for capitali- 
 sation ? The small owner had already largely dis- 
 appeared. The corporate life and mutual obligations 
 which had supported him and confirmed him in his 
 property had been broken to pieces by no "economic 
 development," but by the deliberate action of the rich. 
 He was ignorant because his schools had been taken 
 from him and the universities closed to him. He was 
 the more ignorant because the common life which 
 once nourished his social sense and the co-operative 
 arrangements which had once been his defence had 
 disappeared. When you sought an accumulation of 
 corn, of clothin g, of housing, of fuel as the indispensable 
 preliminary to the launching of your new industry; 
 when you looked round for someone who could find 
 the accumulated wealth necessary for these consider- 
 able experiments, you had to turn to the class which 
 had already monopolised the bulk of the means of 
 production in England. The rich men alone could 
 furnish you with those supplies. 
 
 Nor was this all. The supplies once found and the 
 adventure '' capitalised," that form of human energy 
 which lay best to hand, which was indefinitely ex- 
 ploitable, weak, ignorant, and desperately necessit- 
 ous, ready to produce for you upon almost any terms, 
 
 74 
 
THE DISTRIBUTIVE FAILED 
 
 and glad enough if you would only keep it alive, 
 was the existing proletariat which the new pluto- 
 cracy had created when, in cornering the wealth of 
 the country after the Reformation, they had thrust 
 out the mass of Englishmen from the possession of 
 implements, of houses, and of land. 
 
 The rich class, adopting some new process of pro- 
 duction for its private gain, worked it upon those 
 lines of mere competition which its avarice had al- 
 ready established. Co-operative tradition was dead. 
 Where would it find its cheapest labour ? Obviously 
 among the proletariat — not among the remaining 
 small owners. What class would increase under the 
 new wealth ? Obviously the proletariat again, with- 
 out responsibilities, with nothing to leave to its pro- 
 geny ; and as they swelled the capitalist's gain, they 
 enabled him with increasing power to buy out the 
 small owner and send him to swell by another tribu- 
 tary the proletarian mass. 
 
 It was upon this account that the Industrial Re- 
 volution, as it is called, took in its very origins the 
 form which has made it an almost unmixed curse for 
 the unhappy society in which it has flourished. The 
 rich,alreadypossessedof the accumulations by which 
 that industrial change could alone be nourished, in- 
 herited all its succeeding accumulations of imple- 
 ments and all its increasing accumulations of sub- 
 sistence. The factory system, starting upon a basis 
 75 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 of capitalist and proletariat, grew in the mould which 
 had determined its origins. With every new advance 
 the capitalist looked for proletariat grist to feed the 
 productive mill. Every circumstance of that society, 
 the form in which the laws that governed ownership 
 and profit were cast, the obligations of partners, the 
 relations between " master" and "man," directly made 
 for the indefinite expansion of a subject, formless, 
 wage-earning class controlled by a small body of 
 owners, which body would tend to become smaller 
 and richer still, and to be possessed of power ever 
 greater and greater as the bad business unfolded. 
 
 The spread of economic oligarchy was everywhere, 
 and not in industry alone. The great landlords de- 
 stroyed deliberately and of set purpose and to their 
 ownadvantagethe common rightsovercommonland. 
 The small plutocracy with which they were knit up, 
 and with whose mercantile elements they were now 
 fused, directed everything to its own ends. That 
 strong central government which should protect the 
 community againstthe rapacityofafewhadgonegen- 
 erations before. Capitalism triumphant wielded all 
 the mechanism of legislation and of information too. 
 It still holds them ; and there is not an example of 
 so-called "Social Reform "to-day which isnotdemon- 
 strably (though often subconsciously) directed to the 
 further entrenchment and confirmation of an indus- 
 trial society in which it is taken for granted that a 
 
 76 
 
THE DISTRIBUTIVE FAILED 
 
 few shall own, that the vast majority shall live at a 
 wage under them, and that all the bulk of English- 
 men may hope for is the amelioration of their lot by 
 regulations and by control from above — but not by 
 property ; not by freedom. 
 
 Weall feel — and thosefew of us who have analysed 
 the matter not only feel but know — that the Capitalist 
 society thus gradually developed from its origins in 
 the capture of the land four hundred years ago has 
 reached its term. It is almost self-evident that it can- 
 not continue in the form which nowthree generations 
 have known, and it is equally self-evident that some 
 solution must be found for the intolerable and in- 
 creasing instability with which it has poisoned our 
 lives. But before considering the solutions variously 
 presented byvarious schools of thought, I shall in my 
 next section show how and why the English Capi- 
 talist Industrial System is thus intolerably unstable 
 and consequently presents an acute problem which 
 must be solved under pain of social death. 
 
 It must be noted that modern Industrialism has spread 
 to many other centres from England. It bears everywhere 
 the features stamped upon it by its origin in this country. 
 
SECTION FIVE 
 
 THE CAPITALIST STATE IN 
 PROPORTION AS IT GROWS 
 PERFECT GROWS UNSTABLE 
 
SECTION THE FIFTH THE CAP- 
 
 ITALIST STATE IN PROPORTION AS IT 
 GROWS PERFECT GROWS UNSTABLE 
 
 FROM THE HISTORICAL DIGRESSION 
 which I have introduced by way of illustrating my 
 subject in the last two sections I now return to the 
 general discussion of my thesis and to the logical 
 process by which it may be established. 
 
 The Capitalist State is unstable, and indeed more 
 properly a transitory phase lying between two per- 
 manent and stable states of society. 
 
 In order to appreciate why this is so, let us recall 
 the definition of the Capitalist State : — 
 
 "A society in which the ownership of the means 
 of production is confined to a body of free citizens 
 not large enough to make up properly a general char- 
 acter of that society, while the rest are dispossessed 
 of the means of production and are therefore prole- 
 tarian, we call Capitalist" 
 
 Note the several points of such a state of affairs. 
 You have private ownership ; but it is not private 
 ownership distributed in many hands and thus fa- 
 miliar as an institution to society as a whole. Again, 
 you have the great majority dispossessed but at the 
 same time citizens, that is, men politically free to act, 
 though economically impotent ; again, though it is 
 but an inference from our definition, it is a neces- 
 81 6 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 sary inference that there will be under Capitalism a 
 conscious, direct, and planned exploitation of the ma- 
 jority (the free citizens who do not own) by the min- 
 ority who are owners. For wealth must be produced : 
 the whole of that community must live : and the pos- 
 sessors can make such terms with the non-possessors 
 as shall make it certain that a portion of what the non- 
 possessors have produced shall go to the possessors. 
 
 A society thus constituted cannot endure. It can- 
 not endure because it is subject to two very severe 
 strains: strains which increase in severity in propor- 
 tion as that society becomes more thoroughly Capi- 
 talist. The first of these strains arises from the diver- 
 gence between the moral theories upon which the 
 State reposes and the social facts which those moral 
 theories attempt to govern. The second strain arises 
 from the insecurity to which Capitalism condemns 
 the great mass of society, and the general character 
 of anxiety and peril which it imposes upon all citi- 
 zens, but in particular upon the majority, which con- 
 sists, under Capitalism, of dispossessed free men. 
 
 Of these two strains it is impossible to say which 
 is the gravest. Either would be enough to destroy 
 a social arrangement in which it was long present. 
 The two combined make that destruction certain ; 
 and there is no longer any doubt that Capitalist so- 
 ciety must transform itself into some other and more 
 stable arrangement. It is the object of these pages 
 
 82 
 
STATE GROWS UNSTABLE 
 
 to discover what that stable arrangement will prob- 
 ably be. 
 
 We say that there is a moral strain already in- 
 tolerably severe and growing more severe with every 
 perfection of Capitalism. 
 
 This moral strain comes from a contradiction be- 
 tween the realities of Capitalist society and the moral 
 base of our laws and traditions. 
 
 The moral base upon which our laws are still ad- 
 ministered and our conventions raised presupposes a 
 state composed of free citizens. Our lawdefends pro- 
 perty as a normal institution with which all citizens 
 areacquainted,and which all citizens respect. It pun- 
 ishes theft as an abnormal incident only occurring 
 when, through evil motives, one free citizen acquires 
 the property of another without his~knowledge and ' 
 against his will. It punishes fraud as another abnor- 
 mal incident in which, from evil motives, one free citi- 
 zen induces another to part with his property upon 
 false representations. It enforces contract, the sole 
 moral base of which is the freedom of the two con- 
 tracting parties, and the power of either, if it so please 
 him, not to enter into a contract which, once entered 
 into,must be enforced. Itgives to an ownerthepower 
 to leave his property by will, under the conception 
 that such ownership and such passage of property (to 
 
 83 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 natural heirs as a rule, but exceptionally to any other 
 whom the testatormaypointout) is thenormal opera- 
 tion of a society generally familiar with such things, 
 and finding them part of the domestic life lived by 
 the mass of its citizens. It casts one citizen in dam- 
 ages if by any wilful action he has caused loss to an- 
 other — for it presupposes him able to pay. 
 
 The sanction upon which social life reposes is, in 
 our moral theory, the legal punishment enforceable 
 in our Courts, and the basis presupposed for the se- 
 curity and material happiness of our citizens is the 
 possession of goods which shall guarantee us from 
 anxiety and permit us an independence of action in 
 the midst of our fellowmen. 
 
 Now contrast all this,the moral theory upon which 
 society is still perilously conducted, the moral theory 
 to which Capitalism itself turns for succour when it 
 is attacked, contrast, I say, its formulae and its pre- 
 suppositions with the social reality of a Capitalist 
 State such as is England to-day. 
 
 Property remains as an instinct perhaps with most 
 of the citizens ; as an experience and a reality it is 
 unknown to nineteen out of twenty. One hundred 
 forms of fraud, the necessary corollaryof unrestrained 
 competition between a few and of unrestrained ava- 
 rice as the motive controlling production, are not or 
 cannot be punished : petty forms of violence in theft 
 and of cunning in fraud the laws can deal with, but 
 
 84 
 
STATE GROWS UNSTABLE 
 
 they can deal with these alone. Our legal machin- 
 ery has become little more than an engine for pro- 
 tecting the few owners against the necessities, the de- 
 mands, or the hatred of the mass of their dispossess- 
 ed fellow-citizens. The vast bulk of so-called " free " 
 contracts are to-day leonine contracts: arrangements 
 which one man was free to take or to leave, but whiih 
 theother man was not free to take or to leave, becauae 
 the second had for his alternative starvation. I 
 
 Most important of all, the fundamental social fact 
 of our movement, far more important than any se- 
 curity afforded by law, or than any machinery which 
 the State can put into action, is the fact that liveli- 
 hoadjs^tihe will of the possessors! It can be grant- 
 ed by the possessors to the non-possessors, or it can 
 be withheld. The real sanction in our society for the 
 arrangements by which it is conducted is not punish- 
 ment enforceable by the Courts, but the withholding 
 of livelihood from the dispossessed by the possessors. 
 ~ |tost men now fear the loss of employment more than 
 they fear legal punishment, and the discipline under 
 which men are coerced in their modern forms of ac- 
 tivity in England is the fear of dismissal. The true 
 masterof the Englishman to-day is not the Sovereign 
 nor the officers of State, nor, save indirectly, the laws; 
 his true master is the Capitalist. 
 
 Of these main truths everyone is aware ; and any- 
 one who sets out to deny them does so to-day at the 
 85 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 peril of his reputation either for honesty or for in- 
 telligence. 
 
 If it be asked why things have come to a head so 
 late (Capitalism having been in growth for so long), 
 the answer is that England, even now the most com- 
 pletely Capitalist State of the modern world, did not 
 itself become a completely Capitalist State until the 
 present generation. Within the memory of men now 
 living half England was agricultural, with relations 
 domestic rather than competitive between thevarious 
 human factors to production. 
 
 This moral strain, therefore, arising from the diver- 
 gence between what our laws and moral phrases pre- 
 tend, and what our society actually is, makes of that 
 society an utterly unstable thing. 
 
 This spiritual thesis is of far greater gravity than 
 the narrow materialism of a generation now passing 
 might imagine. Spiritual conflict is more fruitful of 
 instability in the State than conflict of any other 
 kind, and there is acute spiritual conflict, conflict in 
 every man's conscience and ill-ease throughout the 
 commonwealth when the realities of society are di- 
 vorced from the moral base of its institutions. 
 
 The second strain which we have noted in Capi- 
 talism, its second element of instability, consists in 
 the fact that Capitalism destroys security. 
 
 86 
 
STATE GROWS UNSTABLE 
 
 Experience is enough to save us any delay upon 
 this main point of our matter. But even without ex- 
 perience we could reason with absolute certitude from 
 the very nature of Capitalism that its chief effect 
 would be the destruction of security in human life. 
 
 Combine these two elements : the ownership of the 
 means of production by a very few ; the political free- 
 dom of owners and non -owners alike. There follows 
 immediately from that combination a competitive 
 market wherein the labour of the non-owner fetches 
 just what it is worth, not as full productive power, 
 but as productive power which will leave a surplus to 
 the Capitalist. It fetches nothing when the labourer 
 cannot work, more in proportion to the pace at which 
 he is driven ; less in middle age than in youth ; less 
 in old age than in middle age; nothing in sickness ; 
 nothing in despair. ^, 
 
 A man in a position to accumulate (the normal 
 result of human labour), a man founded upon pro- 
 perty in sufficient amount and in established form is 
 no more productive in his non-productive moments 
 than is a proletarian ; but his life is balanced and re- 
 gulated by his reception of rent and interest as well 
 as wages. Surplus values come to him, and are the 
 fly-wheel balancing theextremes of his life and carry- 
 ing him over his bad times. With a proletarian it can- 
 not be so. The aspect whence Capital looks at a hu- 
 man being whose labour it proposes to purchase cuts 
 87 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 right across that normal aspect of human life from 
 which we all regard our own affections, duties, and 
 character. A man thinks of himself, of his chances 
 and of his security along the line of his own individ- 
 ual existencefrom birth to death. Capital purchasing 
 his labour (and not the man himself) purchases but a 
 cross-section of his life, his moments of activity. For 
 the rest, he must fend for himself; but to fend for 
 yourself when you have nothing is to starve. 
 
 As a matter of fact, where a few possess the means 
 of production perfectly free political conditions are 
 impossibler~A perfect Capitalist State cannot exist, 
 though we have come nearer to it in modern England 
 than other and more fortunate nations had thought 
 ^possible. In the perfect Capitalist State there would 
 be no food available for the non-owner save when he 
 was actually engaged in Production, and that absur- 
 dity would, by quickly ending all human lives save 
 those of the owners, put a term to the arrangement. 
 If you left men completely free under a Capitalist 
 system, there would be soheavya mortality from star- 
 vation as would dry up the sources of labour in a very 
 short time. 
 
 Imaginethe dispossessed to be ideally perfect cow- 
 ards, the possessors to consider nothing whatsoever 
 except thebuyingof their labour in the cheapest mar- 
 ket — and the system would break down from the death 
 of children and of out-o'-works and of women. You 
 
STATE GROWS UNSTABLE 
 
 would not have a State in mere decline such as ours 
 is. You would have a State manifestly and patently 
 perishing. 
 
 As a fact, of course, Capitalism cannot proceed to 
 its own logical extreme. So long as the political free- 
 dom of all citizens is granted [the freedom of the few 
 possessors of food to grant or withhold it.of the many 
 non-possessors to strike any bargain at all, lest they 
 lack it]: to exercise such freedom fully is to starve the 
 very young, the old, the impotent, and the despair- 
 ing to death. Capitalism must keep alive, by non- 
 Capitalist methods, great masses of the population 
 who would otherwise starve to death; and that is 
 what Capitalism was careful to do to an increasing 
 extent as it got a stronger and a stronger grip upon 
 the English people. Elizabeth's Poor Law at the be- 
 ginningof the business, the Poor Law of 1 834, coming 
 at a moment when nearly half England had passed 
 into the grip of Capitalism, are original and primitive 
 instances : there are to-day a hundred others. 
 
 Though this cause of insecurity — the fact that the 
 possessors have no direct incentive to keep men alive 
 — is logically the most obvious, and always the most 
 enduring under a Capitalist system, there is another 
 cause more poignant in its effect upon human life. 
 That other cause is the competitive anarchy in pro- 
 89 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 dfiction which restricted ownership coupled with free- 
 dom involves. Consider what is involved by the very 
 /process of production where the implements and 
 / the soil are in the hands of a few whose motive for 
 / causing the proletariat to produce is not the use of 
 ' the wealth created but the enjoyment by those pos- 
 sessors of surplus value or " profit." 
 
 If full political freedom be allowed to any two such 
 possessors of implements and stores, each will active- 
 ly watch his market, attempt to undersell the other, 
 tend to overproduce at the end of some season of 
 extra demand for his article, thus glut the market 
 only to suffer a period of depression afterwards — and 
 so forth. Again, the Capitalist, free, individual direc- 
 tor of production, will miscalculate ; sometimes he 
 will fail, and his works will be shut down. Again, a 
 mass of isolated, imperfectly instructed competing 
 units cannot but direct their clashing efforts at an en- 
 ormous waste, and that waste will fluctuate. Most 
 commissions, most advertisements, most parades, are 
 examples of this waste. If this waste of effort could 
 be made a constant, the parasitical employment it 
 afforded would be a constant too. But of its nature 
 it is a most inconstant thing, and the employment it 
 affords is therefore necessarily precarious. The con- 
 crete translation of this is the insecurity of the com- 
 mercial traveller, the advertising agent, the insurance 
 agent, and every form of touting and cozening which 
 
 90 
 
STATE GROWS UNSTABLE 
 
 competitive Capitalism carries with it. 
 
 Now here again, as in the case of_the insecurity 
 produced by age and sickness, Capitalism cannot be 
 pursnftfr-tn irsfo gical rrirrchisj on, ancTTt is the"element 
 of freedom which suffers. Competition is, as a fact, 
 restricted to an increasing extent by an understand- 
 ingbetween the competitors, accompanied, especially 
 in this country, by the ruin of the smaller competitor 
 through secret conspiracies entered intoby the larger 
 men, and supported by the secret political forces of 
 the State.* In a wora, Capitalism, proving almost 
 as unstable to the owners as to the non-owners, is 
 tending towards stability by losing its essential cha- 
 racter of political freedom. No better proof of the in- 
 stability of Capitalism as a system could be desired. 
 
 Take any one of the numerous Trusts which now 
 control English industry, and have made of modern 
 England the type, quoted throughout the Continent, 
 of artificial monopolies. If the full formula of Capi- 
 talism were accepted by our Courts and our execu- 
 tive statesmen, anyone could start a rival business, 
 undersell those Trusts and shatter the comparative 
 security they afford to industry within their field. 
 The reason that no one does this is that political free- 
 
 * Before any trust is established in this country, thefirst step 
 is to "interest" one of our politicians. The Telephones, the 
 South Wales Coal Trust, the happily defeated Soap Trust, the 
 Soda, Fish, and Fruit Trusts, are examples in point. 
 
 91 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 dom is not, as a fact, protected here by the Courts in 
 commercial affairs. A man attempting to compete 
 with one of our great English Trusts would find him- 
 self at once undersold. He might, by all the spirit 
 of European law for centuries, indict those whowould 
 ruin him, citing them for a conspiracy in restraint of 
 trade ; of this conspiracy he would find the judge and 
 the politicians most heartily in support. 
 
 But it must always be remembered that these con- 
 spiracies in restraint of trade which are the mark of 
 modern England are in themselves a mark of the 
 transition from the true Capitalist phase to another. 
 
 Under the essential conditions of Capitalism — 
 under a perfect political freedom — such conspiracies 
 would be punished by the Courts for what they are : 
 to wit, a contravention of the fundamental doctrine 
 of political liberty. For this doctrine, while it gives 
 any man the right to make any contract he chooses 
 with any labourer and offer the produceat such prices 
 as he sees fit, also involves the protection of that 
 liberty by the punishment of any conspiracy that may 
 have monopoly for its object. If such perfect free- 
 dom is no longer attempted, if monopolies are per- 
 mitted and fostered, it is because the unnatural strain 
 to which freedom, coupled with restricted ownership, 
 gives rise, the insecurity of its mere competition, the 
 anarchy of its productive methods have at last prov- 
 ed intolerable. 
 
 92 
 
STATE GROWS UNSTABLE 
 
 I have already delayed more than was necessary 
 in this section upon the causes which render a Capi- 
 talist State essentially unstable. 
 
 I might have treated the matterempirically.taking 
 for granted the observation which all my readers 
 musthave made, that Capitalism is as a fact doomed, 
 and tpat the Capitalist State has already passed into 
 its first phase of transition. 
 
 *e are clearly no longer possessed of that absol- 
 Dolitical freedom which true Capitalism essen- 
 demands. The insecurity involved, coupled 
 . the divorce between our traditional morals and 
 facts of society, have already introduced such 
 ncf^ el features as the permission of conspiracyamong 
 botji possessors and non-possessors, the compulsory 
 provision of security through State action, and all 
 these reforms, implicit or explicit, the tendency of 
 which I am about to examine. 
 
SECTION SIX 
 
 THE STABLE SOLUTIONS OF 
 THIS INSTABILITY 
 
SECTION THE SIXTH THE STABLE 
 SOLUTIONS OF THIS INSTABILITY 
 
 GIVEN A CAPITALIST STATE, OF ITS 
 nature unstable, it will tend to reach stability by 
 some method or another. 
 
 It is the definition of unstable equilibrium that 
 a body in unstable equilibrium is seeking a stable 
 equilibrium. For instance, a pyramid balanced upon 
 its apex is in unstable equilibrium ; which simply 
 means that a slight force one way or the other will 
 make it fall into a position where it will repose. 
 Similarly, certain chemical mixtures are said to be 
 in unstable equilibrium when their constituent parts 
 have such affinity one for another that a slight shock 
 may make them combine and transform the chemi- 
 cal arrangement of the whole. Of this sort are ex- 
 plosives. 
 
 If the Capitalist State is in unstable equilibrium, 
 this only means that it is seekingastableequilibrium, 
 and that Capitalism cannot but be transformed into 
 some other arrangementwherein Society may repose. 
 
 There are but three social arrangements which can 
 replace Capitalism :Slavery, Socialism, andProperty. 
 
 I may imagine a mixture of any two of these three 
 or of all the three, but each is a dominant type, and 
 from the very nature of the problem no fourth ar- 
 rangement can be devised. 
 
 The problem turns, remember, upon the control 
 of the means of production. Capitalism means that 
 97 7 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 this control is vested in the hands of few, while poli- 
 tical freedom is the appanage of all. If this anomaly 
 cannot endure, from its insecurity and from its own 
 contradiction withits presumed moral basis,youmust 
 either have a transformation of the one or of the other 
 of the two elementswhich combined have beenfound 
 unworkable. These two factors are (i) The owner- 
 ship of the means of Production by a few; (2) The 
 Freedom of all. To solve Capitalism you must get 
 rid of restricted ownership, or of freedom, or of both. 
 Now there is only one alternative to freedom, which 
 is the negation of it. Either a man is free towork and 
 not to work as he pleases, or he may be liable to a 
 legal compulsion to work, backed by the forces of 
 the State. In the first he is a free man; in the second 
 he is by definition a slave. We have, therefore, so 
 far as this factor of freedom is concerned, no choice 
 between a number of changes, but only the oppor- 
 tunity of one, to wit, the establishment of slavery in 
 place of freedom. Such a solution, the direct, im- 
 mediate, and conscious re-establishment of slavery, 
 would provide a true solution of the problems which 
 Capitalism offers. It would guarantee, under work- 
 able regulations, sufficiency and security for the dis- 
 possessed. Such a solution, as I shall show, is the 
 probable goal which our society will in fact approach. 
 To its immediate and conscious acceptance, how- 
 ever, there is an obstacle. 
 
 98 
 
STABLE SOLUTIONS THEREOF 
 
 A direct and conscious establishment of slavery 
 as a solution to the problem of Capitalism, the sur- 
 viving Christian tradition of our civilisation compels 
 men to reject. No reformer will advocate it ; no pro- 
 phet dares take it as yet for granted. All theories of 
 a reformed society will therefore attempt, at first, to 
 leave untouched the factor of Freedom among the 
 elements which make up Capitalism, and will con- 
 cern themselves with some change in the factor of 
 Property. * 
 
 Now, in attempting to remedy the evils of Capi- 
 talism by remedying that one of its two factors which 
 consists in an ill distribution of property, you have 
 two, and only two, courses open to you. 
 
 If you are suffering because property is restricted 
 to a few, you can alter that factor in the problem 
 either by putting property into the hands of many, or 
 by putting it into the hands of none. There is no 
 third course. 
 
 In the concrete, to put property in the hands of 
 " none " means to vest it as a trust in the hands of 
 political officers. If you say that the evils proceeding 
 from Capitalism are due to the institution of property 
 itself, and not to the dispossession of the many by 
 the few, then you must forbid the private possession 
 of the means of production by any particular and 
 
 * By which word "property " is meant, of course, property 
 in the means of Production. 
 
 99 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 private part of the community : but someone must 
 control the means of production, or we should have 
 nothing to eat. So in practice this doctrine means 
 the management of the means of production by those 
 who are the public officers of the community. Whe- 
 ther these public officers are themselves controlled 
 by the community or no has nothing to do with this 
 solution on its economic side. The essential point to 
 grasp is that the only alternative to private property 
 is public property. Somebody must see to the plough- 
 ing and must control the ploughs; otherwise no 
 ploughing will be done. 
 
 It is equally obvious that if you conclude property 
 in itself to be no evil but only the small number of its 
 owners, then your remedy is to increase the number 
 of those owners. 
 
 So much being grasped, we may recapitulate and 
 say that a society like ours, disliking the name of 
 " slavery," and avoiding a direct and conscious re- 
 establishment of the slave status, will necessarily 
 contemplate the reform of its ill-distributed owner- 
 ship on one of two models. The first is the negation 
 of private property and the establishment of what 
 is called Collectivism: that is, the management of the 
 means of production by the political officers of the 
 community. The second is the wider distribution of 
 property until that institution shall become the mark 
 of the whole State, and until free citizens are nor- 
 
 100 
 
STABLE SOLUTIONS THEREOF 
 
 mally found to be possessors of capital or land, or 
 both. 
 
 The first model we call Socialism or the Collec- 
 tivist State ; the second we call the Proprietary or 
 Distributive State. 
 
 With so much elucidated, I will proceed to show 
 in my next section why the second model, involving 
 the redistribution of property, is rejected as imprac- 
 ticable by our existing Capitalist Society, and why, 
 therefore, the model chosen by reformers is the first 
 model, that of a Collectivist State. 
 
 I shall then proceed to show that at its first in- 
 ception all Collectivist Reform is necessarily de- 
 flected and evolves, in the place of what it had in- 
 tended, a new thing : a society wherein the owners 
 remain few and wherein the proletarian mass accepts 
 security at the expense of servitude. 
 
 Have I made myself clear ? 
 
 If not, I will repeat for the third time, and in its 
 briefest terms, the formula which is the kernel of my 
 whole thesis. 
 
 ^The Capitalist State breeds a Collectivist Theory 
 which in action produces something utterly different 
 from Collectivism : to wit, the SERVILE STATE. 
 
SECTION SEVEN 
 
 SOCIALISM IS THE EASIEST 
 
 APPARENT SOLUTION OF 
 
 THE CAPITALIST CRUX 
 
SECTION THE SEVENTH 
 
 SOCIALISM THE EASIEST APPARENT 
 SOLUTION OF THE CAPITALIST CRUX 
 
 I SAY THAT THE LINE OF LEAST RESIST- 
 ance,if it be followed, leads aCapltallstState to trans- 
 form itself into a Servile State. 
 
 I propose to show that this comes about from the 
 fact that not a Distributive but a Collectivist solution 
 is the easiest for a Capitalist State to aim at, and that 
 yet, in the very act of attempting Collectivism, what 
 results is not Collectivism at all, but the servitude of 
 the many, and the confirmation in their present privi- 
 lege of the few ; that is, the Servile State. 
 
 Men to whom the institution of slavery is abhor- 
 rent propose for the remedy of Capitalism one of 
 two reforms. 
 
 Either they would put property into the hands of 
 most citizens, so dividing land and capital that a de- 
 termining number of families in the State were pos- 
 sessed of the means of production ; or they would put 
 those means of production into the hands of the po- 
 litical officers of the community, to be held in trust 
 for the advantage of all. 
 
 The first solution may be called the attempted 
 establishment of the Distributive State. The 
 second may be called the attempted establishment 
 of the Collectivist State. 
 
 Those who favour the first course are the Conser- 
 105 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 vatives or Traditionalists. They are men who respect 
 and would, if possible, preserve the old forms of Chris- 
 tian European life. They know that property was 
 thus distributed throughout the State during the 
 happiest periods of our past history ; they also know 
 that where it is properly distributed to-day, you have 
 greater social sanity and ease than elsewhere. In 
 general, those who would re-establish, if possible, the 
 Distributive State in the place of, and as a remedy 
 for, the vices and unrest of Capitalism, are men con- 
 cerned with known realities, and having for their goal 
 a condition of society which experience has tested 
 and proved both stable and good. They are then, 
 of the two schools of reformers, the more practical in 
 the sense that they deal more than do the Collectiv- 
 ists (called also Socialists) with things which either 
 are or have been in actual existence. But they are 
 less practical in another sense (as we shall see in a 
 moment) from the fact that the stage of the disease 
 with which they are dealing does not readily lend 
 itself to such a reaction as they propose. 
 
 The Collectivist.on the other hand, proposes to put 
 land and capital into the hands of the political officers 
 of the community,and this on the understanding that 
 they shall hold such land and capital in trust for the 
 advantage of the community. In making this pro- 
 posal he is evidently dealing with a state of things 
 hitherto imaginary, and his ideal is not one that has 
 
 106 
 
EASIEST SOLUTION 
 
 been tested by experience, nor one of which our race 
 and history can furnish instances. In this sense, there- 
 fore, he is the less practical of the two reformers. His 
 ideal cannot be discovered in any past, known, and 
 recorded phase of our society. We cannot examine 
 Socialism in actual working, nor can we say (as we 
 can say of well-divided property) : " On such and such 
 an occasion, in such and such a period of European 
 history, Collectivism was established and produced 
 both stability and happiness in society." 
 
 In this sense, therefore, the Collectivist is far less 
 practical than the reformer who desires well-distri- 
 buted property. 
 
 On the other hand, there is a sense in which this 
 Socialist is more practical than that other type of 
 reformer, from the fact that the stage of the disease 
 into which we have fallen apparently admits of his 
 remedy with less shock than it admits of a reaction 
 towards well-divided property. 
 
 For example : the operation of buying out some 
 great tract of private ownership to-day (as a railway 
 or a harbour company) with public funds, continu- 
 ing its administration by publicly paid officials and 
 converting its revenue to public use, is a thing with 
 which we are familiar and which seemingly might be 
 indefinitely multiplied. Individual examples of such 
 transformation of waterworks, gas, tramways, from a 
 Capitalist to a Collectivist basis are common, and the 
 107 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 change does not disturb any fundamental thing in 
 our society. When a private Watercompanyor Tram- 
 way line is bought by some town and worked there- 
 after in the interests of the public, the transaction is 
 effected without any perceptible friction, disturbs the 
 life of no private citizen, and seems in every way 
 normal to the society in which it takes place. 
 
 Upon the contrary, the attempt to create a large 
 numberofshareholdersinsuch enterprises and artifici- 
 ally to substitute many partners, distributed through- 
 out a great number of the population, in the place of 
 theoriginalfewcapitalistowners, would prove lengthy 
 and at every step would arouse opposition, would 
 create disturbance, would work at an expense of great 
 friction, and would be imperilled by the power of the 
 new and many owners to sell again to a few. 
 
 In a word, the man who desires to re-establish pro- 
 perty as an institution normal to most citizens in the 
 State is working against the grain of our existing 
 Capitalist society, while amanwhodesirestoestablish 
 Socialism — that is Collectivism — is working with the 
 grain of that society. The first is like a physician 
 who should say to a man whose limbs were partially 
 atrophied from disuse : " Do this and that, take such 
 and such exercise, and you will recover the use of 
 your limbs." The second is like a physician who 
 should say : " You cannot go on as you are. Your 
 limbs are atrophied from lack of use. Your attempt 
 
 108 
 
EASIEST SOLUTION 
 
 to conduct yourself as though they were not is use- 
 less and painful ; you had better make up your mind 
 to be wheeled about in a fashion consonant to your 
 disease." The Physician is the Reformer, his Patient 
 the Proletariat. 
 
 It is not the purpose of this book to show how and 
 under what difficulties a condition of well-divided 
 property might be restored and might take the place 
 (even in England) of that Capitalism which is now 
 no longer either stable or tolerable ; but for the pur- 
 poses of contrast and to emphasise my argument I 
 will proceed, before showing how the Collectivist un- 
 consciously makes for the Servile State, to show what 
 difficulties surround the Distributive solution and 
 why, therefore, the Collectivist solution appeals so 
 much more readily to men living under Capitalism. 
 
 If I desire to substitute a number of small owners 
 for a few large ones in some particular enterprise, 
 how shall I set to work ? 
 
 I might boldly confiscate and redistribute at a 
 blow. But by what process should I choose the new 
 owners ? Even supposing that there was some ma- 
 chinery whereby the justice of the new distribution 
 could be assured, how could I avoid the enormous 
 and innumerable separate acts of injustice that would 
 attach togeneral redistributions? To say "none shall 
 own" and to confiscate is one thing; to say" all should 
 109 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 own" and apportion ownership is another. Action of 
 this kind would so disturb the whole network of eco- 
 nomic relations as to bring ruin at once to the whole 
 body politic, and particularly to the smaller interests 
 indirectly affected. In a society such as ours a catas- 
 trophe falling upon the State from outside might in- 
 directly do good by making such a redistribution 
 possible. But no one working from within the State 
 could provoke that catastrophe without ruining his 
 own cause. 
 
 If, then, I proceed more slowly and more rationally 
 and canalise the economic life of society so that small 
 property shall gradually be built up within it, see 
 against what forces of inertia and custom I have to 
 work to-day in a Capitalist society ! 
 
 If I desire to benefit small savings at the expense 
 of large, I must reverse the whole economy under 
 which interest is paid upon deposits to-day. It is far 
 easier to save £100 out of a revenue of £1000 than 
 to save £10 out of a revenue of £100. It is infinitely 
 easier to save £10 out of a revenue of ^100 than £5 
 out of a revenue of £50. To build up small property 
 through thriftwhen once the Mass have fallenintothe 
 proletarian trough is impossible unless you deliber- 
 ately subsidise small savings, offering them a reward 
 which, in competition, they could never obtain; and to 
 do this the whole vast arrangement of credit must be 
 worked backwards. Or, let the policy be pursued of 
 
 no 
 
EASIEST SOLUTION 
 
 penalising u idertakings with few owners, of heavily 
 taxing large blocks of shares and of subsidising with 
 the produce small holders in proportion to the small- 
 ness of their holding. Here again you are met with 
 the difficulty of a vast majority who cannot even bid 
 for the smallest share. 
 
 One might multiply instances of the sort indefi- 
 nitely.but the strongest force against the distribution 
 of ownership in a society already permeated with 
 Capitalist modes of thought is still the moral one : 
 Will men want to own ? Will officials, administrators, 
 and law-makers be able to shake off the power which 
 under Capitalism seems normal to the rich ? If I ap- 
 proach, for instance, the works of one of our great 
 Trusts, purchase it with public money, bestow, even 
 asagift,the shares thereof to its workmen ; can I count 
 upon any tradition of property in their midst which 
 will prevent their squandering the new wealth? Can I 
 discover any relics of the co-operative instinct among 
 such men ? Could I get managers and organisers to 
 take a group of poor men seriously or to serve them 
 as they would serve rich men ? Is not the whole psy- 
 chology of a Capitalist society divided between the 
 proletarian mass which thinks in terms not of pro- 
 perty but of" employment," and the few owners who 
 are alone familiar with the machinery of administra- 
 tion? 
 
 I have touched but very briefly and superficially 
 in 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 upon this matter, because it needs no elaboration. 
 Though it is evident that with a sufficient will and a 
 sufficient social vitality property could be restored, 
 it is evident that all efforts to restore it have in a 
 Capitalist society such as our own a note of oddity, 
 of doubtful experiment, of being unco-ordinated with 
 other social things around them, which marks the 
 heavy handicap under which any such attempt must 
 proceed. It is like recommending elasticity to the 
 aged. 
 
 On the other hand, the Collectivist experiment is 
 thoroughly suited (in appearance at least) to the Cap- 
 italist society which it proposes to replace. It works 
 with the existing machinery of Capitalism, talks and 
 thinks in the existing terms of Capitalism, appeals 
 to just those appetites which Capitalism has aroused, 
 and ridicules as fantastic and unheard-of just those 
 things in society the memory of which Capitalism 
 has killed among men wherever the blight of it has 
 spread. 
 
 So true is all this that the stupider kind of Col- 
 lectivist will often talk of a "Capitalist phase" of 
 society as the necessary precedent to a " Collectivist 
 phase." A trust or monopoly is welcomed because it 
 "furnishesa mode of transition from private to public 
 ownership." Collectivism promises employment to 
 the great mass who think of production only in terms 
 of employment. It promises to itsworkmen the secur- 
 
 112 
 
EASIEST SOLUTION 
 
 ity which a great and well-organised industrial Capi- 
 talist unit (like one of our railways) can give through 
 a system of pensions, regular promotion,etc, but that 
 security vastly increased through the fact that it is 
 the State and not a mere unit of the State which 
 guarantees it. Collectivism would administer, would 
 pay wages, would promote, would pension off, would 
 fine — and all the rest of it — exactly as the Cap- 
 italist State does to-day. The proletarian, when the 
 Collectivist (or Socialist) State is put before him, per- 
 ceives nothing in the picture save certain ameliora- 
 tions of his present position. Who can imagine that 
 if,say,two of our great industries, Coal and Railways, 
 were handed over to the State to-morrow, the armies 
 of men organised therein would find any change in 
 the character of their lives, save in some increase of 
 security and possibly in a very slight increase of earn- 
 ings? 
 
 The whole scheme of Collectivism presents, so far 
 as the proletarian mass of a Capitalist State is con- 
 cerned, nothingunknownatall,but a promise of some 
 increment in wages and a certainty of far greater 
 ease of mind. 
 
 To that small minority of a Capitalist society which 
 owns the means of production, Collectivism will of 
 courseappear as an enemy,but,even so.it is an enemy 
 which they understand and an enemy with whom they 
 can treat in terms common both to that enemy and 
 113 8 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 to themselves. If, for instance, the State proposes 
 to take over such and such a trust now paying 4 per 
 cent, and believes that under State management it 
 will make the trust pay 5 per cent, then the trans- 
 ference takes the form of a business proposition : the 
 State is no harder to the Capitalists taken over than 
 wasMrYerkestothe Underground. Again, the State, 
 having greater credit and longevity, can (it would 
 seem) * " buy out " any existing Capitalist body upon 
 favourable terms. Again, the discipline by which the 
 State would enforce its rules upon the proletariat it 
 employed would be the same rules as those by which 
 the Capitalist imposes discipline in his own interests 
 to-day. 
 
 There is in the whole scheme which proposes to 
 transform the Capitalist into the Collectivist State no 
 element of reaction, the use of no term with which a 
 Capitalist society is not familiar, the appeal to no in- 
 stinct, whether of cowardice, greed, apathy, or me- 
 chanical regulation, with which a Capitalist com- 
 munity is not amply familiar. 
 
 In general, if modern Capitalist England weremade 
 by magic a State of small owners, we should all suffer 
 an enormous revolution. We should marvel at the 
 insolence of the poor, at the laziness of the contented, 
 at the strange diversities of task, at the rebellious, 
 
 * That this is an illusion I shall attempt to show on a later 
 page. 
 
 114 
 
EASIEST SOLUTION 
 
 vigorous personalities discernible upon every side. 
 But if this modern Capitalist England could, by a 
 process sufficiently slow to allow for the readjust- 
 ment of individual interests, be transformed into a 
 Collectivist State, the apparent change at the end of 
 that transition would not be conspicuous to the most 
 of us, and the transition itself should have met with 
 no shocks that theorycan discover. Theinsecure and 
 hopeless margin below the regularly paid ranks of 
 labour would have disappeared into isolated work- 
 places of a penal kind : we should hardly miss them. 
 Many incomes now involving considerable duties to 
 the State would have been replaced by incomes as 
 large or larger, involving much the same duties and 
 bearing only the newer name of salaries. The small 
 shop-keeping class would find itself in part absorbed 
 under public schemes at a salary, in part engaged in 
 the old work of distribution at secure incomes ; and 
 such small owners as were left, of boats, of farms, even 
 of machinery, would perhaps know the new state of 
 things into which they had survived through nothing 
 more novel than some increase in the irritating sys- 
 tem of inspection andof onerous petty taxation : they 
 are already fairly used to both. 
 
 This picture of the natural transition from Capi- 
 talism to Collectivism seems so obvious that many 
 Collectivists in a generation immediately past believ- 
 ed that nothing stood between them and the realisa- 
 
 "5 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 tion of their ideal save the unintelligence of mankind. 
 They had only to argue and expound patiently and 
 systematically for the great transformation tobecome 
 possible. They had only to continue arguing and ex- 
 pounding for it at last to be realised. 
 
 I say," of the last generation." To-day that simple 
 and superficialjudgmentisgetting woefully disturbed. 
 The most sincere and single-minded of Collectivists 
 cannot but note that the practical effect of their pro- 
 paganda is not an approach towards the Collectivist 
 State at all, but towards something very different. It 
 is becoming more and more evident that with every 
 new reform — and those reforms commonly promoted 
 by particular Socialists, and in a puzzled way blessed 
 by Socialists in general — another state emerges more 
 and more clearly. It is becoming increasingly certain 
 that the attempted transformation of Capitalism in- 
 to Collectivism is resulting not in Collectivism at all, 
 but in some third thing which the Collectivist never 
 dreamt of, or the Capitalist either ; and that third 
 thing is the SERVILE State : a State, that is, in which 
 the mass of men shall be constrained by law to labour 
 to the profit of a minority, but, as the price of such 
 constraint, shall enjoy a security which the old Capi- 
 talism did not give them. 
 
 Why is the apparently simple and direct action of 
 Collectivist reform diverted into so unexpected a 
 channel? And in what new laws and institutions does 
 
 116 
 
EASIEST SOLUTION 
 
 modem England in particular and industrial society 
 in general show that this new form of the State is 
 upon us ?• 
 
 To these two questions I will attempt an answer in 
 the two concluding divisions of this book. 
 
SECTION EIGHT 
 
 THE REFORMERS AND THE 
 REFORMED ARE ALIKE MAK- 
 ING FOR THE SERVILE STATE 
 
SECTION EIGHT THE REFORMERS 
 AND THE REFORMED ARE ALIKE 
 MAKING FOR THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 I PROPOSE IN THIS SECTION TO SHOW 
 how the three interests which between them account 
 for nearly the whole of the forces making for social 
 change in modern England are all necessarily drift- 
 ing towards the Servile State. 
 
 Of these three interests the first two represent the 
 Reformers — the third the people to be Reformed. 
 
 These three interests are, first, the Socialist, who 
 is the theoretical reformer working along the line of 
 least resistance; secondly, the " Practical Man" who 
 as a "practical " reformer depends on his shortness of 
 sight, and is therefore to-day a powerful factor; while 
 the third is that great proletarian mass for whom the 
 change is being effected, and on whom it is being im- 
 posed. What they are most likely to accept, the way 
 in which they will react upon new institutions is the 
 most important factor of all, for they are the material 
 with and upon which the work is being done. 
 
 (i) Of the Socialist Reformer : 
 
 I say that men attempting to achieve Collectivism 
 or Socialism as the remedy for the evils of the Capi- 
 talist State find themselves drifting not towards a 
 Collectivist State at all, but towards a Servile State. 
 
 The Socialist movement, the first of the three fac- 
 tors in this drift, is itself made up of two kinds 
 121 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 of men : there is (a) the man who regards the public 
 ownership of the means of production (and the con- 
 sequent compulsion of all citizens to work under the 
 direction of the State) as the only feasible solution of 
 our modern social ills. There is also (b) the man who 
 loves the Collectivist ideal in itself, who does not 
 pursue it so much because it is a solution of modern 
 Capitalism, as because it is an ordered and regular 
 form of society which appeals to him in itself. He 
 loves to consider the ideal of a State in which land 
 and capital shall be held by public officials who shall 
 order other men about and so preserve them from 
 the consequences of their vice, ignorance, and folly. 
 
 These types are perfectlydistinct, in many respects 
 antagonistic, and between them they cover the whole 
 Socialist movement. 
 
 Now imagine either of these men at issue with the 
 existing state of Capitalist society and attempting to 
 transform it. Along what line of least resistance will 
 either be led ? 
 
 (a) The first type will begin by demanding the con- 
 fiscation of the means of production from the hands 
 of their present owners, and the vesting of them in the 
 State. But wait a moment. That demand is an ex- 
 ceedingly hard thing to accomplish. The present 
 owners have between them and confiscation a stony 
 moral barrier. It is what most men would call the 
 moral basis of property (the instinct that property is 
 
 122 
 
MAKING FOR SERVILE STATE 
 
 a right), and what all men would admit to be at least 
 a deeply rooted tradition. Again, they have behind 
 them the innumerable complexities of modern own- 
 ership. 
 
 To take a very simple case. Decree that all com- 
 mon lands enclosed since so late a date as 1760 shall 
 revert to the public. There you have a very moder- 
 ate case and a very defensible one. But conceive for 
 a moment how many small freeholds, what a nexus 
 of obligation and benefit spread over millions, what 
 thousands of exchanges, what purchases made upon 
 the difficult savings of small men such a measure 
 would wreck ! It is conceivable, for, in the moral 
 sphere, society can do anything to society ; but it 
 would bring crashing down with it twenty times the 
 wealth involved and all the secure credit of our com- 
 munity. In a word, the thing is, in the conversa- 
 tional use of that term, impossible. So your best type 
 of Socialist reformer is led to an expedient which I 
 will here only mention — as it must be separately con- 
 sidered at length later on account of its fundamental 
 importance — the expedient of " buying out " the pre- 
 sent owner. 
 
 It is enough to say in this place that the attempt 
 to " buy out " without confiscation is based upon an 
 economic error. This I shall prove in its proper 
 place. For the moment I assume it and pass on to 
 the rest of my reformer's action. 
 123 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 He does not confiscate, then ; at the most he " buys 
 out " (or attempts to " buy out ") certain sections of 
 the means of production. 
 
 But this action by no means covers the whole of 
 his motive. By definition the man is out to cure what 
 he sees to be the great immediate evils of Capitalist 
 society. He is out to cure the destitution which it 
 causes in great multitudes and the harrowing in- 
 security which it imposes upon all. He is out to sub- 
 stitute for Capitalist society a society in which men 
 shall all be fed, clothed, housed, and in which men 
 shall not live in a perpetual jeopardy of their hous- 
 ing, clothing, and food. 
 
 Well, there is a way of achieving that without 
 confiscation. 
 
 This reformer rightly thinks that the ownership 
 of the means of production by a few has caused the 
 evils which arouse his indignation and pity. But they 
 have only been so caused on account of a combina- 
 tion of such limited ownership with universal free- 
 dom. The combination of the two is the very defini- 
 tion of the Capitalist State. It is difficult indeed to 
 dispossess the possessors. It is by no means so diffi- 
 cult (as we shall see again when we are dealing with 
 the mass whom these changes will principally affect) 
 to modify the factor of freedom. 
 
 You can say to the Capitalist : " I desire to dis- 
 
 124 
 
MAKING FOR SERVILE STATE 
 
 possess you, and meanwhile I am determined that 
 your employees shall live tolerable lives." The Capi- 
 talist replies : " I refuse to be dispossessed, and it is, 
 short of catastrophe, impossible to dispossess me. 
 But if you will define the relation between my em- 
 ployees and myself, I will undertake particular re- 
 sponsibilities due to my position. Subject the prole- 
 tarian, as a proletarian, and because he is a proletarian, 
 to special laws. Clothe me, the Capitalist, as a Capi- 
 talist, and because I am a Capitalist, with special 
 converse duties under those laws. I will faithfully 
 see that they are obeyed; Iwill compel myemployees 
 to obey them, and I will undertake the new rdle im- 
 posed upon me by the State. Nay, I will go further, 
 and I will say that such a novel arrangement will 
 make my own profits perhaps larger and certainly 
 more secure." 
 
 This idealist social reformer, therefore, finds the 
 current of his demand canalised. As to one part of 
 it, confiscation, it is checked and barred ; as to the 
 other, securing human conditions for the proletariat, 
 the gates are open. Half the river is dammed by a 
 strong weir, but there is a sluice, and that sluice can 
 be lifted. Once lifted, the whole force of the current 
 will run through the opportunity so afforded it; there 
 will it scour and deepen its channel ; there will the 
 main stream learn to run. 
 
 To drop the metaphor, all those things in the true 
 125 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 Socialist's demand which are compatible with the 
 Servile State can certainly be achieved. The first 
 steps towards them are already achieved. They are 
 of such a nature that upon them can be based a 
 further advance in the same direction, and the whole 
 Capitalist Statecanbe rapidly and easily transformed 
 into the Servile State, satisfying in its transforma- 
 tion the more immediate claims and the more urgent 
 demands of the social reformer whose ultimate ob- 
 jective indeed may be the public ownership of capi- 
 tal and land, but whose driving power is a burning 
 pity for the poverty and peril of the masses. 
 
 When the transformation is complete there will 
 be no ground left, nor any demand or necessity, for 
 public ownership. The reformer only asked for it 
 in order to secure security and sufficiency : he has 
 obtained his demand. 
 
 Here are security and sufficiency achieved by an- 
 other and much easier method, consonant with and 
 proceeding from the Capitalist phase immediately 
 preceding it : there is no need to go further. 
 
 In this way the Socialist whose motive is human 
 good and not mere organisation is being shepherded 
 in spite of himself aivay from his Collectivist ideal 
 and towards a society in which the possessors shall 
 remain possessed, the dispossessed shall remain dis- 
 possessed, in which the mass of men shall still work 
 for the advantage of a few, and in which those few 
 
 126 
 
MAKING FOR SERVILE STATE 
 
 shall still enjoy the surplus values produced by labour, 
 but in which the special evils of insecurity and in- 
 sufficiency, in the main the product of freedom, have 
 been eliminated by the destruction of freedom. 
 
 At the end of the process you will have two kinds 
 of men, the owners economically free, and control- 
 ling to their peace and to the guarantee of their liveli- 
 hood the economically unfree non-owners. But that 
 is the Servile State. 
 
 (i>) The second type of socialist reformer may be 
 dealt with more briefly. In him the exploitation of 
 man by man excites no indignation. Indeed, he is 
 not of a type to which indignation or any other lively 
 passion is familiar. Tables, statistics, an exact frame- 
 work for life — these afford him the food that satisfies 
 his moral apetite ; the occupation most congenial to 
 him is the "running" of men : as a machine is run. 
 
 To such a man the Collectivist ideal particularly 
 appeals. 
 
 It is orderly in the extreme. All that human and 
 organic complexity which is the colour of any vital 
 society offends him by its infinite differentiation. Heis 
 disturbed by multitudinous things; and the prospect 
 of a vast bureaucracy wherein the whole of life shall 
 be scheduled and appointed tocertainsimpleschemes 
 deriving from the co-ordinate work of public clerks 
 and marshalled by powerful heads of departments 
 127 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 gives his small stomach a final satisfaction. 
 
 Now this man, like the other, would prefer to begin 
 with public property in capital and land, and upon 
 that basis to erect the formal scheme which so suits 
 his peculiar temperament. (It need hardly be said 
 that in his vision of a future society he conceives of 
 himself as the head of at least a department and pos- 
 sibly of the whole State — but that is by the way.) But 
 while he would prefer to begin with a Collectivist 
 scheme ready-made, he finds in practice that he can- 
 notdoso. Hewould havetoconfiscate.justas themore 
 hearty Socialist would ; and if that act is very difficult 
 to the man burning at thesight of human wrongs, how 
 much more difficult is it to a man impelled by nosuch 
 motive force and directed by nothing more intense 
 than,a mechanical appetite for regulation? 
 
 He cannot confiscate or begin to confiscate. Atthe 
 best he will " buy out " the Capitalist. 
 
 Now, in his case, as in the case of the more human 
 Socialist, " buying out " is, as I shall show in its pro- 
 per place, a system impossible of general application. 
 
 But all thoseotherthings forwhich suchaman cares 
 much more than he does for the socialisation of the 
 means of production — tabulation, detailed adminis- 
 tration of men, the co-ordination of many efforts un- 
 der one schedule, the elimination of all private power 
 to react against his Department, all these are im- 
 mediately obtainable without disturbing the existing 
 
 128 
 
MAKING FOR SERVILE STATE 
 
 arrangement of society. With him, precisely as with 
 the other socialist,what he desires can be reached with- 
 out any dispossession of the few existing possessors. 
 He has but to secure the registration of the proleta- 
 riat; next to ensure that neither they in the exercise 
 of their freedom, nor the employer in the exercise 
 of his,can produce insufficiency orinsecurity — and he 
 is content. Let laws exist which make the proper 
 housing, feeding, clothing, and recreation of the pro- 
 letarianmassbeincumbent upon the possessing class, 
 and the observance of such rules be imposed, by in- 
 spection and punishment, upon those whom he pre- 
 tends to benefit, and all that he really cares for will 
 be achieved. 
 
 To such a man the Servile State is hardly a thing 
 towards which he drifts, it is rather a tolerable alter- 
 native to his ideal Collectivist State, which alternative 
 he is quite prepared to accept and regards favourab- 
 ly. Already the greater part of such reformers who, 
 a generation ago, would have called themselves "So- 
 cialists " are now less concerned with any scheme for 
 socialising Capital and Land than with innumerable 
 schemes actually existing, some of them possessing 
 already the force of laws, for regulating, " running," 
 and drilling the protelariat without trenching by an 
 inch upon the privilege in implements, stores, and land 
 enjoyed by the small Capitalist class. 
 
 The so-called" Socialist " of this type has not fall- 
 129 9 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 en into the Servile State by a miscalculation. He has 
 fathered it; he welcomes its birth, he foresees his pow- 
 er over its future. 
 
 So much for the Socialist movement, which a gen- 
 eration ago proposed to transform our Capitalist so- 
 ciety into one where the community should be the 
 universal owner and all men equally economically 
 free or unfree under its tutelage. To-day their ideal 
 has failed, and of the two sources whence their energy 
 proceeded, the one is reluctantly, the other gladly, 
 acquiescent in the advent of a society which is not So- 
 cialist at all but Servile. 
 
 (2) Of the Practical Reformer : 
 
 There is another type of Reformer, one who prides 
 himself on not being a socialist, and one of the great- 
 est weight to-day. He also is making for the Ser- 
 vile State. This second factor in the change is the 
 " Practical Man " ; and this fool, on account of his 
 great numbers and determining influence in the de- 
 tails of legislation, must be carefully examined. 
 
 It is your " Practical Man " who says : " Whatever 
 you theorists and doctrinaires may hold with regard 
 to this proposal (which I support),though it may offend 
 some abstractdogmaofyours,yet«'#/nzrfz'c£you must 
 admit that it does good. If you had practical experi- 
 ence of the misery of the Jones' family, or had done 
 
 130 
 
MAKING FOR SERVILE STATE 
 
 practical work yourself in Pudsey, you would have 
 seen that a practical man," etc. 
 
 It is not difficult to discern that the Practical Man 
 in social reform is exactly the same animal as the 
 Practical Man in every other department of human 
 energy, and may be discovered su ffering from the same 
 twin disabilities whichstampthe Practical Man where- 
 ever found: these twin disabilities are an inability to 
 definehisown first principles andan inabilityto follow 
 the consequences proceeding from his own action. 
 Both these disabilities proceed from one simple and 
 deplorable form of impotence, the inability to think. 
 
 Let us help the Practical Man in his weakness and 
 do a little thinking for him. 
 
 As a social reformer he has of course (though he 
 does not know it) first principles and dogmas like all 
 the rest of us, and his first principles and dogmas are 
 exactly the same as those which his intellectual su- 
 periors hold in the matter of social reform. The two 
 things intolerable to him as a decent citizen (though 
 a very stupid human being) are insufficiency and in- 
 security. When he was " working " in the slums of 
 Pudsey or raiding the proletarian Jones's from the 
 secure base of Toynbee Hall, what shocked the worthy 
 man most was "unemployment" and " destitution " : 
 that is, insecurityand insufficiency in flesh and blood. 
 
 Now, if the Socialist who has thought out his case, 
 whether as a mere organiser or as a man hungering 
 
 131 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 and thirsting after justice, is led away from Socialism 
 and towards the Servile State by the force of modern 
 things in England, how much more easily do you not 
 think the " Practical Man " will be conducted towards 
 that same Servile State, likeanydonkeytohisgrazing 
 ground ? To those dull and short-sighted eyes the 
 immediate solution which even the beginnings of the 
 Servile State propose are what a declivity is to a piece 
 of brainless matter. The piece of brainless matterrolls 
 down the declivity, and the Practical Man lollops from 
 Capitalism to the Servile State with the same inevi- 
 table ease. Jones has not got enough. If you give 
 him something in charity, that something will besoon 
 consumed, and then Jones will again not have enough. 
 Jones has been seven weeks out of work. If you get 
 him work "under our unorganised and wastefulsystem, 
 etc.," he may lose it just as he lost his first jobs. The 
 slums of Pudsey, as the Practical Man knows by Practi- 
 cal experience, are often unemployable. Then there 
 are "the ravages of drink" : more fatal still the dread- 
 ful habit mankind has offorming families and breeding 
 children. The worthy fellow notes that "asapractical 
 matter of fact such men do not work unless you make 
 them." 
 
 He does not, because he cannot, co-ordinate all 
 these things. He knows nothing of a society in which 
 free men were once owners, nor of the co-operative 
 and instinctive institutions for the protection of own- 
 
 132 
 
MAKING FOR SERVILE STATE 
 
 ershipwhich such a society spontaneously breeds. He 
 "takes the world ashefindsit" — and the consequence 
 is that whereas men of greater capacity may admit 
 with different degrees of reluctance the general prin- 
 ciples of the Servile State, /ie,lhe Practical Man, posi- 
 tively gloats on every new detail in the building up 
 of that form of society. And the destruction of free- 
 dom by inches (though he does not see it to be the 
 destruction of freedom) is the one panacea so obvious 
 that he marvels at the doctrinaires who resist or sus- 
 pect the process. 
 
 It has been necessary to waste so much time on 
 this deplorable individual because the circumstances 
 of our generation give him a peculiar power. Under 
 the conditions of modern exchangea man of that sort 
 enjoys great advantages. He is to be found as he 
 neverwas in any other society before our own, possess- 
 ed of wealth, and political as never was any such citizen 
 until our time. Of history with all its lessons ; of the 
 great schemes of philosophy and religion, of human 
 nature itself he is blank. 
 
 The Practical Man left to himself would not pro- 
 duce the Servile State. He would not produce any- 
 thingbuta welter of anarchic restrictions which would 
 lead at last to some kind of revolt. 
 
 Unfortunately, he is not left to himself. He is but 
 the ally or flanking party of great forces which he 
 does nothing to oppose, and of particular men, able 
 
 133 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 and prepared for the work of general change, who use 
 him with gratitude and contempt. Were he not so 
 numerous in modern England, and, under the extra- 
 ordinary conditions of a Capitalist State, so economi- 
 cally powerful, I would have neglected him in this 
 analysis. As itis,wemayconsoleourselvesbyremem- 
 bering that the advent of the Servile State, with its 
 powerful organisation and necessityforlucid thought 
 in those who govern, will certainly eliminate him. 
 
 Ourreformers, then, both thosewhothinkand those 
 who do not, both those who are conscious of the pro- 
 cess and those who are unconscious of it, are making 
 directly for the Servile State. 
 
 (3) What of the third factor ? What of the people 
 about to be reformed ? What of the millions upon 
 whose carcasses the reformers are at work, and who 
 are the subject of the great experiment? Do they 
 tend, as material, to accept or to reject that transfor- 
 mation from free proletarianism to servitude which 
 is the argument of this book ? 
 
 The question isanimportant onetodecide.forupon 
 whether the material is suitable or unsuitable for the 
 work to which it is subjected, depends the success of 
 every experiment making for the Servile State. 
 
 134 
 
MAKING FOR SERVILE STATE 
 
 The mass of men in the Capitalist State is prole- 
 tarian. As a matter of definition, the actual number 
 of theproletariat and the proportion that number bears 
 to the total number of families in the State may vary, 
 but must be sufficient to determine the general char- 
 acter of the State before we can call that State Capi- 
 talist. 
 
 But, as we have seen, the Capitalist State is not a 
 stable, and therefore not a permanent, condition of 
 society. It has proved ephemeral ; and upon that very 
 account theproletariat in anyCapitalist State retains 
 to a greater or less degree some memories of a state 
 of society in which its ancestors were possessors of 
 property and economically free. 
 
 The strength of this memoryor tradition is thefirst 
 elementwe have to bear in mindinour problem, when 
 we examine how far a particular proletariat, such as 
 the English proletariat to-day, is ready to accept the 
 Servile State which would condemn it to a perpetual 
 loss of property and of all the free habit which pro- 
 perty engenders. 
 
 Next be it noted that under conditions of freedom 
 the Capitalist class may be entered by the more cun- 
 ning or the more fortunate of the proletariat class. 
 Recruitment of the kind was originally sufficiently 
 common in the first development of Capitalism to be 
 a standing feature in society and to impress the im- 
 agination of the general. Such recruitment is still 
 
 135 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 possible. The proportion which it bears to the whole 
 proletariat, thechancewhich each member of the pro- 
 letariat may think he has of escaping from his pro- 
 letarian condition in a particular phase of Capitalism 
 such as is ours to-day, is the second factor in the pro- 
 blem. 
 
 The third factor, and by far the greatest of all, is 
 the appetite of the dispossessed for that security and 
 sufficiency of whichCapitalism, with its essential con- 
 dition of freedom, has deprived them. 
 
 Now let us consider the interplay of these three 
 factors in the English proletariat as we actuallyknow 
 it at this moment. That proletariat is certainly the 
 great mass of the State : it covers about nineteen- 
 twentieths of the population — if we exclude Ireland, 
 where, as I shall point out in my concluding pages, 
 the reaction against Capitalism, and therefore against 
 its development towards a Servile State, is already 
 successful. 
 
 As to the first factor, it has changed very rapidly 
 within the memory of men now living. The tradi- 
 tional rights of property are still strong in the minds 
 of the English poor. All the moral connotations of 
 that right are familiar to them. They are familiar 
 with the conception of theft as a wrong ; they are ten- 
 acious of any scraps of property which they may ac- 
 quire. They could all explain what is meantbyowner- 
 
 136 
 
MAKING FOR SERVILE STATE 
 
 ship, by legacy, by exchange, and by gift, and even 
 by contract. There is not one but could put himself 
 in the position, mentally, of an owner. 
 
 But the actual experience of ownership, and the 
 effect which that experience has upon character and 
 uponone's yiewof theState is a very different matter. 
 Within the memory of people still living a sufficient 
 number of Englishmen were owning (as small free- 
 holders, small masters, etc.) to give to the institution 
 of property coupled with freedom a very vivid effect 
 upon the popular mind. More than this, there was a 
 living tradition proceeding from the lips of men who 
 could still bear living testimony to therelics of abetter 
 state of things. I have myself spoken, when I was a 
 boy, to old labourers intheneighbourhood of Oxford 
 who had risked their skins in armed protest against 
 the enclosure of certain commons, and who had of 
 course suffered imprisonment by a wealthy judge as 
 the reward of their courage ; and I have myself spoken 
 in Lancashire to old men who could retrace for me, 
 either from their personal experience the last phases 
 of small ownership in the textile trade, or, from what 
 their fathers had told them, the conditions of a time 
 when small and well-divided ownership in cottage 
 looms was actually common. 
 
 All that has passed. The last chapterof its passage 
 has been singularly rapid. Roughly speaking, it is 
 the generation brought up under the Education Acts 
 13; 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 of the last forty years which has grown up definitely 
 and hopelessly proletarian. The present instinct,use, 
 and meaning of property is lost to it : and this has 
 had two very powerful effects.each strongly inclining 
 our modern wage-earners to ignore the old barriers 
 which lay between a condition of servitude and a con- 
 dition of freedom. The first effect is this : that pro- 
 perty is no longer what they seek, nor what they think 
 obtainable for themselves. The second effect is that 
 they regard the possessors of property as a class apart, 
 whom they always must ultimately obey, often envy, 
 and sometimes hate ; whose moral right to so singu- 
 lar a position most of them wouldhesitate to concede, 
 and many ofthem would nowstronglydeny.butwhose 
 position they, at any rate, accept as a known and per- 
 manent social fact, the origins of which they have for- 
 gotten, and the foundations of which they believe to 
 be immemorial. 
 
 To sum up : The attitude of the proletariat in Eng- 
 land to-day (the attitude of the overwhelming ma- 
 jority, that is, of English families) towards property 
 and towards that freedom which is alone obtainable 
 through property is no longer an attitude of experi- 
 ence or of expectation. They think of themselves as 
 wage-earners. To increase the weekly stipend of the 
 wage-earner is an object which they vividly appreci- 
 ate and pursue. To make him cease to be a wage- 
 earner is an object that would seem to them entirely 
 
 138 
 
MAKING FOR SERVILE STATE 
 
 outside the realities of life. 
 
 What of the second factor, the gambling chance 
 which the Capitalist system, with its necessary con- 
 dition of freedom, of the legal power to bargain fully, 
 and so forth, permits to the proletarian of escaping 
 from his proletariat surroundings ? 
 
 Of this gambling chance and the effect it has upon 
 men's minds we may say that, while it has not dis- 
 appeared, it has very greatly lost in force during 
 the last forty years. One often meets men who tell 
 one, whether they are speaking in defence of or a- 
 gainst the Capitalist system, that it still blinds the 
 proletarian to any common consciousness of class, 
 because the proletarian still has the example before 
 him of members of his class, whpm he has known, 
 rising (usually by various formsof villainy)totheposi- 
 tion of capitalist. But when one goes down among 
 the working men themselves, one discovers that the 
 hope of such a change in the mind of any individual 
 worker is now exceedingly remote. Millions of men 
 in great groups of industry, notably in the transport 
 industry and in the mines, have quite given up such 
 an expectation. Tiny as the chance ever was, exag- 
 gerated as the hopes in a lottery always are, that tiny 
 chance has fallen in the general opinion of the workers 
 to be negligible, and that hope which a lottery breeds 
 is extinguished. The proletarian now regards him- 
 self as definitely proletarian, nor destined within hu- 
 139 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 man likelihood to be anything but proletarian. 
 
 These two factors, then, the memory of an older 
 condition of economic freedom, and the effect of a 
 hope individuals might entertain of escaping from 
 the wage-earning class, the two factors which might 
 act most strongly against the acceptation of the Ser- 
 vile State by that class, have so fallen in value that 
 they offer but little opposition to the third factor in 
 the situation which is making so strongly for the 
 Servile State, and which consists in the necessity all 
 men acutely feel for sufficiency and for security. It 
 is this third factor alone which need be seriously con- 
 sidered to-day, when we ask ourselves how far the 
 material upon which social reform is working, that 
 is, the masses of the people, may be ready to accept 
 the change. 
 
 The thing may be put in many ways. I will put 
 it in what I believe to be the most conclusive of all, 
 
 If you were to approach those millions of families 
 now living at a wage, with the proposal for a contract 
 of service for life, guaranteeing them employment at 
 what each regarded as his usual full wage, how many 
 would refuse? 
 
 Such a contract would, of course, involve a loss of 
 freedom: a life-contract of the kind is, to be accurate, 
 no contract at all. It is the negation of contract and 
 the acceptation of status. It would lay the man that 
 
 140 
 
MAKING FOR SERVILE STATE 
 
 undertook it under an obligation of forced labour, 
 coterminous and coincident with his power to labour. 
 It would be a permanent renunciation of his right (if 
 such a right exists) to the surplus values created by 
 his labour. If we ask ourselves how many men, or 
 rather how many families, would prefer freedom(with 
 its accompanimentsof certain insecurity and possible 
 insufficiency) to such a life-contract, no one can deny 
 that the answer is : " Very few would refuse it." That 
 is the key to the whole matter. 
 
 What proportion would refuse it no one can de- 
 termine; but I say that even as a voluntary offer, and 
 not as a compulsory obligation, a contract of this sort 
 which would for the future destroy contract and re- 
 erect status of a servile sort would be thought a boon 
 by the mass of the proletariat to-day. 
 
 Now take the truth from another aspect — by con- 
 sidering it thus from one point of view and from 
 another we can appreciate it best — Of what are the 
 mass of men now most afraid in a Capitalist State ? 
 Not of the punishments that can be inflicted by a 
 Court of Law, but of " the sack." 
 
 You may ask a man why he does not resist such 
 and such a legal infamy ; why he permits himself to 
 be the victim of fines and deductions from which the 
 Truck Acts specifically protect him ; why he cannot 
 assert his opinion in this or that matter ; why he has 
 accepted, without a blow, such and such an insult. 
 141 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 Some generations ago a man challenged to tell you 
 why he forswore his manhood in any particular re- 
 gard would have answered you that it was because 
 he feared punishment at the hands of the law ; to-day 
 he will tell you that it is because he fears unemploy- 
 ment. 
 
 Private law has for the second time in our long 
 Europeanstory overcome publiclaw.andthesanctions 
 which the Capitalist can call to the aid of his private 
 rule.by the action of his private will, are stronger than 
 those which the public Courts can impose. 
 
 In the seventeenth century a man feared to go to 
 Mass lest the judges should punish him. To-day a 
 man fears to speak in favour of some social theory 
 which he holds to be just and true lest his master 
 should punish him. To deny the rule of public powers 
 once involved public punishments which most men 
 dreaded, though some stood out. To deny the rule of 
 private powers involves to-day a private punishment 
 against the threat of which very few indeed dare to 
 stand out. 
 
 Look at the matter from yet another aspect. A law 
 is passed (let us suppose) which increases the total 
 revenue of a wage-earner, or guarantees him against 
 the insecurity of his position in some small degree. 
 The administration of that law requires, upon the one 
 hand, a close inquisition into the man's circumstances 
 by public officials, and, upon the other hand, the ad- 
 
 142 
 
MAKING FOR SERVILE STATE 
 
 ninistration of its benefits by that particular Capi- 
 alist or group of Capitalists whom the wage-earner 
 ierves to enrich. Do the Servile conditions attaching 
 o this material benefit prevent a proletarian in Eng- 
 and to-day from preferring the benefit to freedom ? 
 [t is notorious that they do not. 
 
 No matter from what angle you approach the busi- 
 ness, the truth is always the same. That great mass 
 }f wage-earners upon which our society now reposes 
 understands as a present good all that will increase 
 ;ven to some small amount their present revenue 
 ind all that may guarantee them against those perils 
 Df insecurity to which they are perpetually subject. 
 They understand and welcome a good of this kind, 
 and they are perfectly willing to pay for that good 
 the corresponding price of control and enregimen- 
 tation, exercised in gradually increasing degree by 
 those who are their paymasters. 
 
 It would be easy by substituting superficial for 
 fundamental things, or even by proposing certain 
 terms and phrases to be used in the place of terms 
 and phrases now current — it would be easy, I say, by 
 such methods to ridicule or to oppose theprimetruths 
 which I am here submitting. They none the less re- 
 main truths. 
 
 Substitute for the term " employee " in one of our 
 new laws the term " serf," even do so mild a thing as 
 H3 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 to substitute the traditional term " master " for the 
 word " employer," and the blunt words might breed 
 revolt. Impose of a sudden the full conditions of a 
 Servile State upon modern England, and it would 
 certainly breed revolt. But my point is that when 
 the foundations of the thing have to be laid and the 
 first great steps taken, there is no revolt; on the con- 
 trary, there is acquiescence and for the most part 
 gratitude upon the part of the poor. After the long 
 terrors imposed upon them through a freedom unac- 
 companied by property, they see, at the expense of 
 losing a mere legal freedom, the very real prospect 
 of having enough and not losing it. 
 
 All forces, then, are making for the Servile State 
 in this the final phase of our evil Capitalist society 
 in England. The generous reformer is canalised to- 
 wards it ; the ungenerous one finds it a very mirror 
 of his ideal ; the herd of " practical " men meet at 
 every stage in its inception the " practical " steps 
 which they expected and demanded ; while that pro- 
 letarian mass upon whom the experiment is being 
 tried have lost the tradition of property and of free- 
 dom which might resist the change, and are most 
 powerfully inclined to its acceptance by the positive 
 benefits which it confers. 
 
 It may be objected that however true all this may 
 be, no one can, upon such theoretical grounds, regard 
 the Servile State as something really approaching 
 
 144 
 
MAKING FOR SERVILE STATE 
 
 us. We need not believe in its advent (we shall be 
 told) until we see the first effects of its action. 
 
 To this I answer that the first effects of its action 
 are already apparent. The Servile State is, in indus- 
 trial England to-day, no longer a menace but some- 
 thing in actual existence. It is in process of con- 
 struction. Thefirstmainlinesof it are already plotted 
 out ; the corner-stone of it is already laid. 
 
 To see the truth of this I will next consider servile 
 laws and projects of law, the first of which we already 
 suffer, while the last will pass from project to posi- 
 tive statute in due process of time. 
 
 APPENDIX ON "BUYING-OUT" 
 
 There is an impression abroad among those who pro- 
 pose to expropriate the Capitalist class for the benefit of 
 the State, but who appreciate the difficulties in the way of 
 direct confiscation, that by spreading the process over a 
 sufficient number of years and pursuing it after a certain 
 fashion bearing all the outward appearances of a purchase, 
 the expropriation could be effected without the conse- 
 quences and attendant difficulties of direct confiscation. 
 In other words, there is an impression that the State could 
 " buy-out " the Capitalist class without their knowing it, 
 and that in a sort of painless way this class can be slowly 
 conjured out of existence. 
 
 The impression is held in a confused fashion by most 
 of those who cherish it, and will not bear a clear analysis. 
 
 145 IO 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 It is impossible by any jugglery to "buy-out" the univer- 
 sality of the means of production without confiscation. 
 
 To prove this, consider a concrete case which puts the 
 problem in the simplest terms : — 
 
 A community of twenty-two families lives upon the pro- 
 duce of two farms, the property of only two families out 
 of that twenty-two. 
 
 The remaining twenty families are Proletarian. The 
 two families, with their ploughs, stores, land, etc., are 
 Capitalist. 
 
 The labour of the twenty proletarian families applied to 
 the land and capital of these two capitalist families pro- 
 duces 300 measures of wheat, of which 200 measures, or 
 10 measures each, form the annual support of the twenty 
 proletarian families ; the remaining 100 measures are the 
 surplus value retained as rent, interest, and profit by the 
 two Capitalist families, each of which has thus a yearly 
 income of 50 measures. 
 
 The State proposes to produce, after a certain length 
 of time, a condition of affairs such that the surplus values 
 shall no longer go to the two Capitalist families, but shall 
 be distributed to the advantage of the whole community, 
 while it, the State, shall itself become the unembarrassed 
 owner of both farms. 
 
 Now capital is accumulated with the object of a certain 
 return as the reward of accumulation. Instead of spend- 
 ing his money, a man saves it with the object of retaining 
 as the result of that saving a certain yearly revenue. The 
 measure of this does not fall in a particular society at a 
 particular time below a certain level. In other words, if 
 a man cannot get a certain minimum reward for his ac- 
 cumulation, he will not accumulate but spend. 
 
 What is called in economics " The Law of Diminishing 
 
 146 
 
MAKING FOR SERVILE STATE 
 
 Returns " acts so that continual additions to capital, other 
 things being equal (that is, the methods of production re- 
 maining the same), do not provide a corresponding increase 
 of revenue. A thousand measures of capital applied to a 
 particular area of natural forces will produce, for instance, 
 40 measures yearly, or 4 per cent. ; but 2000 measures 
 applied in the same fashion will not produce 80 meas- 
 ures. They will produce more than the thousand measures 
 did, but not more in proportion ; not double. They will 
 produce, say, 60 measures, or 3 per cent., upon the cap- 
 ital. The action of this universal principle automatically 
 checks the accumulation of capital when it has reached 
 such a point that the proportionate return is the least 
 which a man will accept. If it falls below that he will 
 spend rather than accumulate. The limit of this mini- 
 mum in any particular society at any particular time gives 
 the measure to what we call "the Effective Desire of Ac- 
 cumulation." Thus in England to-day it is a little over 3 
 per cent. The minimum which limits the accumulation of 
 capital is a mimimum return of about one-thirtieth yearly 
 upon such capital, and this we may call for shortness the 
 " E.D.A." of our society at the present time. 
 
 When, therefore, the Capitalist estimates the full value 
 of his possessions, he counts them in "so many years' pur- 
 chase."* And that means that he is willing to take in a 
 lump sum down for his possessions so many times the year- 
 ly revenue which he at present enjoys. If his E.D.A. is 
 
 * By an illusion which clever statesmanship could use to the advan- 
 tage of the community, he even estimates the natural forces he con- 
 trols (which need no accumulation, but are always present) on the 
 analogy of his capital, and will part with them at " so many years' 
 purchase. " It is by taking advantage of this illusion that land pur- 
 chase schemes (as in Ireland) happily work to the advantage of the 
 dispossessed. 
 
 H7 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 one-thirtieth, he will take a lump sum representing thirty 
 times his annual revenue. 
 
 So far so good. Let us suppose the two Capitalists in 
 our example to have an E.D.A. of one-thirtieth. They 
 will sell to the State if the State can put up thirty times 
 their surplus or "income," i.e. 3000 measures of wheat. 
 
 Now, of course, the State can do nothing of the kind. 
 The accumulations of wheat being already in the hands 
 of the Capitalists, and those accumulations amounting to 
 much less than 3000 measures of wheat, the thing appears 
 to be a deadlock. 
 
 But it is not a deadlock if the Capitalist is a fool. The 
 State can go to the Capitalists and say : " Hand me over 
 your farms, and against them I will give you guarantee 
 that you shall be paid rather more than 100 measures of 
 wheat a year for the thirty years. In fact, I will pay you 
 half as much again until these extra payments amount to 
 a purchase of your original stock." 
 
 Out of what does this extra amount come ? Out of the 
 State's power to tax. 
 
 The State can levy a tax upon the profits of both Cap- 
 italists A and B, and pay them the extra with their own 
 money. 
 
 In so simple an example it is evident that this " ringing 
 of the changes " would be spotted by the victims, and that 
 they would bring against it precisely the same forces which 
 they would bring against the much simpler and more 
 straightforward process of immediate confiscation. 
 
 But it is argued that in a complex State, where you are 
 dealing with myriads of individual Capitalists and thou- 
 sands of particular forms of profit, the process can be 
 masked. 
 
 There are two ways in which the State can mask its 
 
 148 
 
MAKING FOR SERVILE STATE 
 
 action (according to this policy). It can buy out first one 
 small area of land and capital out of the general taxation 
 and then another, and then another, until the whole has 
 been transferred ; or it can tax with peculiar severity certain 
 trades which the rest who are left immune will abandon to 
 their ruin, and with the general taxation plus this special 
 taxation buy out those unfortunate trades which will, of 
 course, have sunk heavily in value under the attack. 
 
 The second of these tricks will soon be apparent in any 
 society, however complex; for after one unpopular trade 
 had been selected for attack the trying on of the same me- 
 thods in another less unpopular field will at once rouse sus- 
 picion.* 
 
 The first method, however, might have some chance of 
 success, at least for a long time after it was begun, in a 
 highly complex and numerous society were it not for a 
 certain check which comes in of itself. That check is the 
 fact that the Capitalist only takes more than his old yearly 
 revenue with the object of reinvesting the surplus. 
 
 I have a thousand pounds in Brighton railway stock, 
 yielding me 3 per cent. : ^30 a year. The Government 
 asks me to exchange my bit of paper against another bit 
 of paper guaranteeing the payment of ^50 a year, that is, 
 an extra rate a year, for so many years as will represent 
 over and above the regular interest paid a purchase of my 
 stock. The Government's bit of paper promises to pay to 
 the holder ^50 a year for, say, thirty-eight years. I am 
 delighted to make the exchange, not because I am such a 
 fool as to enjoy the prospect of my property being extin- 
 guished at the end of thirty-eight years, but because I hope 
 
 * Thus you can raid the brewers in a society half- Puritan where 
 brewing is thought immoral by many, but proceed to railway stock 
 and it will be a very different matter. 
 
 149 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 to be able to reinvest the extra ^20 every year in some- 
 thing else that will bring me in 3 per cent. Thus, at the 
 end of the thirty-eight years I shall (or my heirs) be better 
 off than I was at the beginning of the transaction, and I 
 shall have enjoyed during its maturing my old ^30 a year 
 all the same. 
 
 The State can purchase thus on a small scale by subsi- 
 dising purchase out of the general taxation. It can, there- 
 fore, play this trick over a small area and for a short time 
 with success. But the moment this area passes a very nar- 
 row limit the " market for investment " is found to be re- 
 stricted, Capital automatically takes alarm, the State can no 
 longer offer its paper guarantees save at an enhanced price. 
 If it tries to turn the position by further raising taxation to 
 what Capital regards as " confiscatory " rates, there will be 
 opposed to its action just the same forces as would be op- 
 posed to frank and open expropriation. 
 
 The matter is one of plain arithmetic, and all the con- 
 fusion introduced by the complex mechanism of "finance " 
 can no more change the fundamental and arithmetical prin- 
 ciples involved than can the accumulation of triangles in an 
 ordnance survey reduce the internal angles of the largest 
 triangle to less than 180 degrees.* In fine : if you desire 
 to confiscate, you must confiscate. 
 
 You cannot outflank the enemy, as Financiers in the city 
 and sharpers on the race-course outflank the simpler of 
 mankind, nor can you conduct the general process of expro- 
 priation upon a muddle-headedhopethat somehow or other 
 something will come out of nothing in the end. 
 
 There are, indeed, two ways in which the State could ex- 
 
 * In using this metaphor I at once record my apologies to those 
 who believe in elliptical and hyperbolic universes, and confess myseH 
 an old-fashioned parabolist. Further, I admit that the triangles in 
 question are spherical. 
 
 150 
 
MAKING FOR SERVILE STATE 
 
 propriate without meeting the resistance that must be pres- 
 ent against any attempt at confiscation. But the first of 
 these ways is precarious, the second insufficient. 
 
 They are as follows : — 
 
 (i) The State can promise the Capitalist a larger yearly 
 revenue than he is getting in the expectation that it, the 
 State, can manage the business better than the Capitalist, 
 or that some future expansion will come to its aid. In other 
 words, if the State makes a bigger profit out of the thing than 
 the Capitalist, it can buy out the Capitalist just as a private 
 individual with a similar business proposition can buy him 
 out. 
 
 But the converse of this is that if the State has calculated 
 badly, or has bad luck, it would find itself endowing the 
 Capitalists of the future instead of gradually extinguishing 
 them. 
 
 In this fashion the State could have "socialised " without 
 confiscation the railways of this country if it had taken them 
 over fifty years ago, promising the then owners more than 
 they were then obtaining. But if it had socialised the han- 
 som cab in the nineties, it would now be supporting in per- 
 petuity that worthy but extinct type the cab-owner (and his 
 children for ever) at the expense of the community. 
 
 The second way in which the State can expropriate with- 
 out confiscation is by annuity. It can say to such Capital- 
 ists as have no heirs or care little for their fate if they have : 
 " You have only got so much time to live and to enjoy your 
 ^30, will you take ^50 until you die?" Upon the bar- 
 gain being accepted the State will, in process of time, though 
 not immediately upon the death of the annuitant, become 
 an unembarrassed owner of what had been the annuitant's 
 share in the means of production. But the area over which 
 this method can be exercised is a very small one. It is not 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 of itself a sufficient instrument for the expropriation of any 
 considerable field. 
 
 I need hardly add that as a matter of fact the so-called 
 "Socialist" and confiscatory measures of our time have 
 nothing to do with the problem here discussed. The State 
 is indeed confiscating, that is, it is taxing in many cases in 
 such a fashion as to impoverish the tax-payer and is lessen- 
 ing his capital rather than shearing his income. But it is 
 not putting the proceeds into the means of production. It 
 is either usingthem for immediateconsumptionin the shape 
 of new official salaries or handing them over to another set 
 of Capitalists.* 
 
 But these practical considerations of the way in which 
 sham Socialist experiments are working belong rather to 
 my next section, in which I shall deal with the actual be- 
 ginnings of the Servile State in our midst. 
 
 * Thus the money levied upon the death of some not very wealthy 
 squire and represented by, say, locomotives in the Argentine, turns 
 into two miles of palings for the pleasant back gardens of a thousand 
 new officials under the Inebriates Bill, or is simply handed over to the 
 shareholders of the Prudential under the Insurance Act. In the first 
 case the locomotives have been given back to the Argentine, and 
 after a long series of exchanges have been bartered against a great 
 number of wood-palings from the Baltic — not exactly reproductive 
 wealth. In the second case the locomotives which used to be the 
 squire's hands become, or their equivalent becomes, means of produc- 
 tion in the hands of the Sassoons. 
 
SECTION NINE 
 
 THE SERVILE STATE 
 HAS BEGUN 
 
SECTION THE NINTH 
 
 THE SERVILE STATE HAS BEGUN 
 
 IN THIS LAST DIVISION OF MY BOOK I 
 deal with the actual appearance of the Servile State 
 in certain laws and proposals now familiar to the 
 Industrial Society of modern England. These are 
 the patent objects, "laws and projects of laws," which 
 lend stuff to my argument, and show that it is based 
 not upon a mere deduction, but upon an observation 
 of things. 
 
 Two forms of this proof are evident: first, the laws 
 and proposals which subject the Proletariat to Servile 
 conditions ; next, the fact that the Capitalist, so far 
 from being expropriated by modern " Socialist " ex- 
 periments, is being confirmed in his power. 
 
 I take these in their order, and I begin by asking 
 in what statutes or proposals the Servile State first 
 appeared among us. 
 
 A false conception of our subject might lead one 
 to find the origins of the Servile State in the restric- 
 tions imposed upon certain forms of manufacture, 
 and the corresponding duties laid upon the Capital- 
 ist in the interest of his workmen. The Factory Laws, 
 as they are in this country, would seem to offer upon 
 this superficial and erroneous view a starting point. 
 They do nothing of the kind ; and the view is super- 
 ficial and erroneous because it neglects the funda- 
 mentals of the case. What distinguishes the Servile 
 State is not the interference of law with the action 
 155 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 of any citizen even in connection with industrial 
 matters. Such interference may or may not indicate 
 the presence of a Servile status. It in no way indi- 
 cates the presence of that status when it forbids a 
 particular kind of human action to be undertaken by 
 the citizen as a citizen. 
 
 The legislator says, for instance, " You may pluck 
 roses ; but as I notice that you sometimes scratch 
 yourself, I will put you in prison unless you cut them 
 with scissors at least 122 millimetres long, and I will 
 appoint one thousand inspectors to go round the 
 country seeing whether the law is observed. My 
 brother-in-law shall be at the head of the Department 
 at £2000 a year." 
 
 We are all familiar with that type of legislation, 
 Weareall familiar with the arguments for and against 
 it in any particular case. We may regard it as oner- 
 ous, futile, or beneficent, or in any other light, accord- 
 ing to our various temperaments. But it does not fall 
 within the category of servile legislation, because it 
 establishes no distinction between two classes of citi- 
 zens, marking off the one as legally distinct from the 
 other by a criterion of manual labour or of income. 
 
 This is even true of such regulations as those which 
 compel a Cotton Mill, for instance, to have no less 
 than such and such an amount of cubic space for each 
 operative, and such and such protection fordangerous 
 machinery. These laws do not concern themselves 
 
 156 
 
SERVILE STATE HAS BEGUN 
 
 with the nature, the amount, or even the existence 
 of a contract for service. The object, for example, of 
 the law which compels one to fence off certain types 
 of machinery is simply to protect human life, regard- 
 less of whether the human being so protected is rich 
 or poor, Capitalist or Proletarian. These laws may 
 in effect work in our society so that the Capitalist is 
 made responsible for the Proletarian, but he is not 
 responsible qud Capitalist, nor is the Proletarian pro- 
 tected gud Proletarian. 
 
 In the same way the law may compel me, if I am 
 a Riparian owner, to put up a fence of statutory 
 strength wherever the water of my river is of more 
 than a statutory depth. Now it cannot compel me 
 to do this unless I am the owner of the land. In a 
 sense, therefore, this might be called the recognition 
 of my Status, because, by the nature of the case, only 
 landowners can be affected by the law, and land- 
 owners would be compelled by it to safeguard the 
 lives of all, whether they were or were not owners of 
 land. 
 
 But the category so established would be purely 
 accidental. The object and method of the law do 
 not concern themselves with a distinction between 
 citizens. 
 
 A close observer might indeed discover certain 
 points in the Factory laws, details and phrases, which 
 did distinctly connote the existence of a Capitalist 
 157 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 and of a Proletarian class. But we must take the 
 statutes as a whole and the order in which they were 
 produced, above all, the general motive and expres- 
 sions governing each main statute, in order to judge 
 whether such examples of interference give us an 
 origin or not. 
 
 The verdict will be that they do not. Such legis- 
 lation may be oppressive in any degree or necessary 
 in any degree, but it does not establish status in the 
 place of contract, and it is not, therefore, servile. 
 
 Neither are those laws servile which in practice 
 attach to the poor and not to the rich. Compulsory 
 education is in legal theory required of every citizen 
 for his children. The state of mind which goes with 
 plutocracy exempts of course all above a certain 
 standard of wealth from this law. But the law does 
 apply to the universality of the commonwealth, 
 and all families resident in Great Britain (not in 
 Ireland) are subject to its provisions. 
 
 These are not origins. A true origin to servile 
 and " statu s" legislation comes later. The first ex- 
 ample of servile legislation to be discovered upon the 
 Statute Book is that which establishes the present 
 form of Employers Liability. 
 
 I am far from saying that that law was passed, as 
 modern laws are beginning to be passed, with the 
 direct object of establishing a new status ; though it 
 was passed with someconsciousness on the part of the 
 
 158 
 
SERVILE STATE HAS BEGUN 
 
 legislator that such a new status was in existence as 
 a social fact. Its motive was merely humane, and the 
 relief which it afforded seemed merely necessary at 
 the time ; but it is an instructive example of the way 
 in which a small neglect of strict doctrine and a slight 
 toleration of anomaly admit great changes into the 
 State. 
 
 There had existed from all time in every com- 
 munity, and there was founded upon common sense, 
 the legal doctrine that if one citizen was so placed 
 with regard to another by contract that he must in 
 the fulfilment of that contract perform certain ser- 
 vices, and if those services accidentally involved 
 damages to a third party, not the actual perpetrator 
 of the damage, but he who designed the particular 
 operation leading to it was responsible. 
 
 The point is subtle, but, as I say, fundamental. It 
 involved no distinction of status between employer 
 and employed. 
 
 Citizen A offered citizen B a sack of wheat down 
 if citizen B would plough for him a piece of land 
 which might or might not produce more than a sack 
 of wheat. 
 
 Of course citizen A expected it would produce 
 more, and was awaiting a surplus value, or he would 
 not have made the contract with citizen B. But, at 
 any rate, citizen B put his name to the agreement, 
 and as a free man, capable of contracting, was cor- 
 159 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 respondingly bound to fulfil it. 
 
 In fulfilling this contract the ploughshare B is 
 driving destroys a pipe conveying water by agree- 
 ment through A's land to C. C suffers damage, and 
 to recover the equivalent of that damage his action 
 in justice and common sense can only be against A, 
 for B was carrying out a plan and instruction of which 
 A was the author. C is a third party who had noth- 
 ing to do with such a contract and could not possibly 
 have justice save by his chances of getting it from 
 A, who was the true author of the unintentional loss 
 inflicted, since he designed the course of work. 
 
 But when the damage is not done to C at all, but 
 to B, who is concerned with a work the risks of which 
 are known and willingly undertaken, it is quite an- 
 other matter. 
 
 Citizen A contracts with citizen B that citizen B, 
 in consideration of a sack of wheat, shall plough a bit 
 of land. Certain known risks must attach to that 
 operation. Citizen B, if he is a free man, undertakes 
 those risks with his eyes open. For instance, he may 
 sprain his wrist in turning the plough, or one of the 
 horses may kick him while he is having his bread-and- 
 cheese. If upon such an accident A is compelled to 
 pay damages to B, a difference of status is at once re- 
 cognised. B undertook to do work which, by all the 
 theory of free contract, was, with its risks and its 
 expense of energy, the equivalent in B's own eyes of 
 
 1 60 
 
SERVILE STATE HAS BEGUN 
 
 a sack of wheat ; yet a law is passed to say that B 
 can have more than that sack of wheat if he is hurt. 
 
 There is no converse right of A against B. If the 
 employer suffers bysuchan accident to the employee, 
 he is not allowed to dock that sack of wheat, though 
 it was regarded in the contract as the equivalent to 
 a certain amount of labour to be performed which, 
 as a fact, has not been performed. A has no action 
 unless B has been culpably negligent or remiss. In 
 other words, the mere fact that one man is working 
 and the other not is the fundamental consideration 
 on which the law is built, and the law says : " You 
 are not a free man making a free contract with all 
 its consequences. You are a worker, and therefore an 
 inferior : you are an employee ; and that status gives 
 you a special position which would not be recognised 
 in the other party to the contract." 
 
 The principle is pushed still further when an em- 
 ployer is made liable for an accident happening to one 
 of his employees at the hands of another employee. 
 
 A gives a sack of wheat to Band D each if they will 
 dig a well for him. All three parties are cognisant 
 of the risks and accept them in the contract. B, hold- 
 ing the rope on which D is lowered, lets it slip. If 
 they were all three men of exactly equal status, obvi- 
 ously D's action would be against B. But they are 
 not of equal status in England to-day. B and D are 
 employees, and are therefore in a special and inferior 
 161 ii 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 position beforethe lawcompared with their employer 
 A. D's action is, by this novel principle, no longer 
 against B, who accidentally injured him by a per- 
 sonal act, however involuntary, for which a free man 
 would be responsible, but against A, who was inno- 
 cent of the whole business. 
 
 Now in all this it is quite clear that A has peculiar 
 duties not because he is a citizen, but because he is 
 something more: an employer ; and B and D have 
 special claims on A, not because they are citizens,but 
 becausetheyaresomethingless: viz. employees. They 
 can claim protection from A, as inferiors of a superior 
 in a State admitting such distinctions and patronage. 
 
 It will occur at once to the reader that in our ex- 
 isting social state the employee will be very grateful 
 for such legislation. One workman cannot recover 
 from another — simply because the other will have no 
 goods out of which to pay damages. Let the burden, 
 therefore, fall upon the rich man ! 
 
 Excellent. But thatis not the point. Toarguethus 
 is to say that Servile legislation is necessary if we are 
 to solve the problems raised by Capitalism. It remains 
 servile legislation none the less. It is legislation that 
 would not exist in a society where property was well 
 divided and where a citizen could normally pay 
 damages for the harm he had himself caused.* 
 
 * How true it is that the idea of status underlies this legis- 
 lation can easily be testedbytakingparallelcases,inoneofwhich 
 
 162 
 
SERVILE STATE HAS BEGUN 
 
 This first trickle of the stream, however, though it 
 is of considerable historical interest as a point of de- 
 parture, is not of very definite moment to our subject 
 compared with the great bulk of later proposals, some 
 of which are already law, others upon the point of 
 becoming law, and which definitely recognise the 
 Servile State, the re-establishment of status in the 
 place of contract, and the universal division of citi- 
 zens into two categories of employers and employed. 
 
 These last merit a very different consideration, 
 for they will represent to history the conscious and 
 designed entry of Servile Institutions into the old 
 Christian State. They are not "origins," small indi- 
 cationsofcomingchange which thehistorian will pain- 
 fully discover as a curiosity. They are the admitted 
 foundations of a new order, deliberately planned by 
 a few, confusedly accepted by the many, as the basis 
 upon which a novel and stable society shall arise to 
 replacetheunstableand passing phase of Capitalism. 
 
 working men are concerned, in the other the professional class. 
 If I contract to write for a publisher a complete History of the 
 County of Rutland, and in the pursuit of that task, while exam- 
 ining some object of historical interest, fall down a pit, I should 
 not be able to recover against the publisher. But if I dress in 
 mean clothes, and the same publisher, deceived, gives me a 
 month's work at cleaning out his ornamental water and I am 
 wounded in that occupation by a fierce fish, he will be mulcted 
 to my-advantage, and that roundly. 
 
 163 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 They fall roughly into three categories : — 
 (i) Measures by which the insecurity of the prole- 
 tariat shall be relieved through the action of the em- 
 ploying class, or of the proletariat itself acting under 
 compulsion. 
 
 (2) Measures by which the employer shall be com- 
 pelled to give not less thanacertain minimum forany 
 labour he may purchase, and 
 
 (3) Measures which compel a man lacking the 
 means of production to labour, though he may have 
 made no contract to that effect. 
 
 The last two, as will be seen in a moment, are com- 
 plementary one of another. 
 
 As to the first: Measures to palliate the insecurity 
 of the proletariat. 
 
 We have of this an example in actual law at this 
 moment. Andthatlaw — thelnsurance Act — (whose 
 political source and motive I am not here discussing) 
 follows in every particular the lines of a Servile State. 
 
 (a) Its fundamental criterion is employment. In 
 other words, I am compelled toenteraschemeprovid- 
 ing me against the mischances of illness and unem- 
 ployment not because I am a citizen, but only if I am: 
 
 (1) Exchanging services for goods ; and either 
 
 (2) Obtaining less than a certain amount of goods 
 for those services, or 
 
 (3) A vulgar fellow working with his hands. 
 Thelawcarefullyexcludes from itsprovisionsthose 
 
 164 
 
SERVILE STATE HAS BEGUN 
 
 forms of labour to which the educated and therefore 
 powerful classes are subject, and further excludes from 
 compulsion the mass of those who are for the moment 
 earning enough to make them a class to be reckoned 
 with as economically free. I may be a writer of books 
 who,shouldhe fall ill, will leave in thegreatestdistress 
 the family which he supports. If the legislator were 
 concerned for the morals of citizens, I should most 
 undoubtedly come under this law, under the form of 
 a compulsory insuranceaddedtomyincome tax. But 
 the legislator is not concerned with people of my sort. 
 He is concerned with anewstatus whichherecognises 
 in the State, to wit, the proletariat. He envisages the 
 proletariat not quiteaccuratelyasmen either poor, or, 
 if they are not poor, atany rate vulgar people working 
 with their hands, and he legislates accordingly. 
 
 (b) Still more striking.as an example of status tak- 
 ing the place of contract, is the fact that this law puts 
 the duty of controlling the proletariat and of seeing 
 that the law is obeyed not upon the proletariat itself, 
 but upon the Capitalist class. 
 
 Now this point is of an importance that cannot be 
 exaggerated. 
 
 The future historian, whatever his interest in the 
 first indications of that profound revolution through 
 which we are so rapidly passing, will most certainly 
 fix upon that one point as the cardinal landmark of 
 our times. The legislator surveying the Capitalist 
 165 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 State proposes as a remedy for certain of its evils the 
 establishment of two categories in the State, compels 
 the lower man to registration, to a tax, and the rest of 
 it,andfurthercompels the upper man to be the instru- 
 ment in enforcing that registration and in collecting 
 that tax. No one acquainted with the way in which 
 any one of the great changes of the past has taken place, 
 the substitution of tenure for the Roman proprietary 
 right in land.orthesubstitution of the mediaeval peas- 
 ant for the serf of the Dark Ages, can possibly mis- 
 understand the significance of such a turning point 
 in our history. 
 
 Whether it will be completed or whether a reaction 
 will destroy it is another matter. Its mere proposal 
 is of the greatest possible moment in the inquiry we 
 are here pursuing. 
 
 Of the next two groups, the fixing of a Minimum 
 Wage and the Compulsion to Labour(which,asIhave 
 said, and will shortly show, are complementary one 
 to the other), neither has yet appeared in actual legis- 
 lation, but both are planned, both thought out, both 
 possessed of powerful advocates, and both upon the 
 threshold of positive law. 
 
 The fixing of a Minimum Wage, with a definite 
 sum fixed by statute, has not yet* entered our laws, 
 but the first step towards such a consummation has 
 
 * September 191 2. 
 
 166 
 
SERVILE STATE HAS BEGUN 
 
 been taken in the shape of giving legal sanction tosome 
 hypothetical Minimum Wage which shall be arrived 
 at after discussion within a particular trade. That 
 trade is,of course.the mining industry. The law does 
 not say: " No Capitalist shall pay a miner less than so 
 many shillings for so many hours' work." But it does 
 say: "Figures having been arrived at by local boards, 
 any miner working within the area of each board 
 can claim by force of law the minimum sum estab- 
 lished by such boards." It is evident that from this 
 step to the next, which shall define some sliding scale 
 of remuneration for labour according to prices and 
 the profits of capital, is an easy and natural transition. 
 It would give both parties what each immediately re- 
 quires: to capital a guarantee against disturbance ; to 
 labour sufficiency and security. The whole thing is an 
 excellent object lesson in little of that general move- 
 ment from free contract tostatus, and from the Capital- 
 ist to the Servile State, which is the tide of our time. 
 
 The neglect of older principles as abstract and doc- 
 trinaire; the immediate need of both parties immedi- 
 ately satisfied ; the unforeseen but necessary conse- 
 quence of satisfying such needs in such a fashion — 
 all these, which are apparent in the settlement the 
 mining industry has begun, are the typical forces pro- 
 ducing the Servile State. 
 
 Consider in its largest aspect the nature of such a 
 settlement. 
 167 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 The Proletarian accepts a position in which he pro- 
 duces for the Capitalist a certain total of economic 
 values, and retains out of that total a portion only, 
 leaving to the Capitalist all surplus value. The Capi- 
 talist, on his side, is guaranteed in the secure and 
 permanent expectation of that surplus value through 
 all the perils of social envy; the Proletarian is guar- 
 anteed in a sufficiency and a security for that suffi- 
 ciency ; but by the very action of such a guarantee 
 there is withdrawn from him the power to refuse his 
 labour and thus to aim at putting himself in posses- 
 sion of the means of production. 
 
 Such schemes definitely divide citizens into two 
 classes.theCapitalist and the Proletarian. They make 
 it impossible for the second to combat the privileged 
 position of the first. They introduce into the positive 
 laws of the community a recognition of social facts 
 which already divide Englishmen into two groups of 
 economically more free and economically less free, 
 and they stamp with the authority of the State a 
 new constitution of society. Society is recognised as 
 no longer consisting of free men bargaining freely for 
 their labour or any other commodity in their posses- 
 sion, but of two contrasting status, owners and non- 
 owners. The first must not be allowed to leave the 
 second without subsistence ; the second must not be 
 allowed to obtain that grip upon the means of pro- 
 duction which is the privilege of the first. It is true 
 
 1 68 
 
SERVILE STATE HAS BEGUN 
 
 that this first experiment is small in degree and ten- 
 tative in quality ; but to judge the movement as a 
 general whole we must not only consider the expres- 
 sion it has actually received so far in positive law, but 
 the mood of our time. 
 
 When this first experiment in a minimum wage 
 was being debated in Parliament, what was the great 
 issue of debate ? Upon what did those who were the 
 most ardent reformers particularly insist ? Not that 
 the miners should have an avenue open to them for 
 obtaining possession of the mines ; not even that the 
 State should have an avenue open to it for obtaining 
 such possession; but that the minimum wage should be 
 fixed at a certain satisfactory level ! That, as our re- 
 cent experience testifies for all of us, was the crux of 
 thequarrel. Andthatsuch a point should be the crux, 
 not the socialisation of the mines, nor the admission 
 of the proletariat to the means of production, but 
 only a sufficiency and a security of wage,is amply sig- 
 nificant of the perhaps irresistible forces which are 
 making in the direction for which I argue in this book. 
 
 There was here no attempt of the Capitalist to im- 
 pose Servile conditions norof the Proletarian to resist 
 them. Both parties were agreed upon that funda- 
 mental change. Thediscussion turned upon the mini- 
 mum limit of subsistence to be securely provided, a 
 point which left aside, because it took for granted, 
 the establishment of some minimum in any case. 
 169 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 Next, let it be noted (for it is of moment to a later 
 part of my argument) that experiments of this sort 
 promise to extend piecemeal. There is no likelihood, 
 judging by men's actions and speech, of some grand 
 general scheme for the establishment of a minimum 
 wage throughout the community. Such a scheme 
 would, of course, be as truly an establishment of the 
 Servile State as piecemeal schemes, But, as we shall 
 see in a moment, the extension of the principle piece- 
 meal has a considerable effect upon the forms which 
 compulsion may take. 
 
 The miners' refusal to work, with the exaggerated 
 panic it caused, bred this first tentative appearance of 
 the minimum wage in our laws. Normally, capital 
 prefers free labour with its margin of destitution ; for 
 such an anarchy, ephemeral though it is of its nature, 
 while it lasts provides cheap labour ; from the narrow- 
 est point of view it provides in the still competitive 
 areas of Capitalism a better chance for profits. 
 
 But as one group of workmen after another, con- 
 cerned with trades immediately necessary to the life 
 of the nation, and therefore tolerating but little inter- 
 ruption, learn the power which combination gives 
 them, it is inevitable that the legislator (concentrated 
 as he is upon momentary remedies for difficulties as 
 they arise) should propose for one such trade after an- 
 other the remedy of a minimum wage. 
 
 There can be little doubt that, trade by trade, the 
 
 170 
 
SERVILE STATE HAS BEGUN 
 
 principle will extend. For instance, the two and a 
 half millions now guaranteed against unemployment 
 are guaranteed against it for a certain weekly sum. 
 That weekly sum must bear some relation to their es- 
 timated earnings when they are in employment. 
 
 It is a short step from the calculation of unemploy- 
 ment benefit (its being fixed by statute at a certain 
 level, and that level determined by something which 
 is regarded as the just remuneration of labour in that 
 trade); it is a short step, I say, from that to a statutory 
 fixing of the sums paid during employment. 
 
 The State says to the Serf: "I saw to it that you 
 should have so much when you were unemployed. I 
 find that in some rare cases my arrangement leads to 
 your getting more when you are unemployed than 
 when you are employed. I further find that in many 
 cases, though you get more when you are employed, 
 yetthe difference is not sufficient to tempt a lazy man 
 to work, or to make him take any particular trouble 
 to get work. I must see to this." 
 
 The provision of a fixed schedule during unem- 
 ployment thus inevitably leads to the examination, 
 the defining, and at last the imposition of a minimum 
 wage during employment; and every compulsory 
 provision for unemployed benefits is the seed of a 
 minimum wage. 
 
 Of still greater effect is the mere presence of State 
 regulation in such a matter. The fact that the State 
 171 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 has begun to gather statistics of wages over these 
 large areas of industry, and to do so not for a mere 
 statistical object, but a practical one, and the fact 
 that the State has begun to immix the action of 
 positive law and constraint with the older system 
 of free bargaining, mean that the whole weight of 
 its influence is now in favour of regulation. It is no 
 rash prophecy to assert that in the near future our 
 industrial society will see a gradually extending area 
 of industry in which from two sides the fixing of 
 wages by statute shall appear. From the one side it 
 will come in the form of the State examining the con- 
 ditions of labour in connection with its own schemes 
 for establishing sufficiency and security by insurance. 
 From the other side it will come through the reason- 
 able proposals to make contracts enforceable in the 
 Courtsbetween groups of labour and groups of capital. 
 
 So much, then, for the Principle of a Minimum 
 Wage. It has already appeared in our laws. It is cer- 
 tain to spread. But how does the presence of this in- 
 troduction of a Minimum form part of the advance 
 towards the Servile State? 
 
 I have said that the principle of a minimum wage 
 involves as its converse the principle of compulsory 
 labour. Indeed, most of the importance which the 
 principle of a minimum wage has for this inquiry 
 
 172 
 
SERVILE STATE HAS BEGUN 
 
 lies in that converse necessity of compulsory labour 
 which it involves. 
 
 But as the connection between the two may not 
 be clear at first sight, we must do more than take it 
 for granted. We must establish it by process of reason. 
 
 There are two distinct forms in which the whole 
 policy of enforcing security and sufficiency by law 
 for the proletariat produce a corresponding policy 
 of compulsory labour. 
 
 The first of these forms is the compulsion which 
 the Courts willexerciseuponeither of the parties con- 
 cerned in the giving and in the receiving of the mini- 
 mum wage. The second form is the necessity under 
 which society will find itself, when once the principle 
 of the minimum wage is conceded, coupled with the 
 principle of sufficiency and security, to control those 
 whom the minimum wage excludes from the area of 
 normal employment. 
 
 As to the first form : — 
 
 A Proletarian group has struck a bargain with a 
 groupof Capitalists to the effect that it will produce for 
 that capital ten measures of value in a year, will be 
 content to receive six measures of value for itselfand 
 will leave four measures as surplus value for the Capi- 
 talists. The bargain is ratified ; the Courts have the 
 power to enforce it. If the Capitalists by some trick 
 of fines or by bluntly breaking their word pay out 
 in wages less than the six measures, the Courts must 
 
 T 73 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 have some power of constraining them. In other 
 words, there must be some sanction to the action of 
 the law. There must be some power of punishment, 
 and, through punishment,of compulsion. Conversely, 
 if the men, having struck this bargain, go back upon 
 their word ; if individuals among them or sections 
 among them cease work with a newdemand forseven 
 measures instead of six, the Courts must have the 
 power of constrainingandof punishing them. Where 
 the bargain is ephemeral or at any rate extended over 
 only reasonable limits of time, it would be straining 
 language perhaps to say that each individual case of 
 constraint exercised against the workmen would be 
 a case of compulsory labour. But extend the system 
 over a long period of years, make it normal to in- 
 dustry and accepted as a habit in men's daily con- 
 ception of the way in which their lives should be con- 
 ducted, and the method is necessarily transformed 
 into a system of compulsory labour. In trades where 
 wages fluctuate little this will obviously be the case. 
 " You, the agricultural labourers of this district, have 
 taken fifteen shillings a week for a very long time. 
 1 1 has worked perfectly well. There seems no reason 
 why you should have more. Nay, you putyour hands 
 to it through your officials in the year so and so that 
 you regarded that sum as sufficient. Such and such 
 of your members are now refusing to perform what 
 this Court regards as a contract. They must return 
 
 174 
 
SERVILE STATE HAS BEGUN 
 
 within the limits of that contract or suffer the con- 
 sequences." 
 
 Remember what power analogy exercises over 
 men's minds, and how, when systems of the sort are 
 common to many trades, they will tend to create a 
 general point of view for all trades. Remember also 
 how comparatively slight a threat is already sufficient 
 to control men in our industrial society, the prole- 
 tarian mass of which is accustomed to live from week 
 to week under peril of discharge, and has grown 
 readily amenable to the threat of any reduction in 
 those wages upon which it can but just subsist. 
 
 Nor are the Courts enforcing such contracts or 
 quasi-contracts (as they will come to be regarded) 
 the only inducement. 
 
 A man has been compelled by law to put aside 
 sums from his wages as insurance against unemploy- 
 ment. But he is no longer the judge of how such 
 sums shall be used. They are not in his possession ; 
 they are not even in the hands of some society which 
 he can really control. They are in the hands of a 
 Government official. " Here is work offered you at 
 twenty-five shillings a week. If you do not take it 
 you certainly shall not have a right to the money 
 you have been compelled to put aside. If you will 
 take it the sum shall still stand to your credit, and 
 when next in my judgment your unemployment is 
 not due to your recalcitrance and refusal to labour, 
 175 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 I will permit you to have some of your money : not 
 otherwise." Dovetailing in with this machinery of 
 compulsion is all that mass of registration and doc- 
 keting which is accumulating through the use of 
 Labour Exchanges. Not only will the Official have 
 the power to enforce special contracts, or the power 
 to coerce individual men to labour under the threat 
 of a fine, but he will also have a series of dossiers by 
 which the record of each workman can be established. 
 No man, once so registered and known, can escape; 
 and, of the nature of the system, the numbers caught 
 in the net must steadily increase until the whole mass 
 of labour is mapped out and controlled. 
 
 These are very powerful instruments of compul- 
 sion indeed. They already exist. They are already a 
 part of our laws. 
 
 Lastly, there is the obvious bludgeon of" compul- 
 sory arbitration": a bludgeon so obvious that it is 
 revolting even to our proletariat. Indeed, I know of 
 no civilised European state which has succumbed to 
 so gross a suggestion. For it is a frank admission of 
 servitudeatonestep,and for good and all, such as men 
 of our culture are not yet prepared to swallow.* 
 
 So much, then, for the first argument and the first 
 form in which compulsory labour is seen to be a di- 
 rect and necessary consequence of establishing a mi- 
 
 * But it has twice been brought forward in due process as a 
 Bill in Parliament ! 
 
 176 
 
SERVILE STATE HAS BEGUN 
 
 nimum wage and of scheduling employment to a 
 scale. 
 
 The second is equally clear. In the production of 
 wheat the healthy and skilled man who can produce 
 ten measures of wheat is compelled to work for six 
 measures, and the Capitalist is compelled to remain 
 content with four measures for his share. The law 
 will punish him if he tries to get out of his legal obli- 
 gation and to pay his workmen less than six meas- 
 ures of wheat during the year. What of the man who 
 is not sufficiently strong or skilled to produce even 
 six measures ? Will the Capitalist be constrained to 
 pay him more than the values he can produce ? Most 
 certainly not. The whole structure of production as 
 it was erected during the Capitalist phase of our in- 
 dustry has been left intact by the new laws and cus- 
 toms. Profit is still left a necessity. If it were de- 
 stroyed, still more if a loss were imposed by law, that 
 would be a contradiction of the whole spirit in which 
 all these reforms are being undertaken. They are 
 being undertaken with the object of establishing sta- 
 bility where there is now instability, and of "recon- 
 ciling," as the ironic phrase goes, " the interests of 
 capital and labour." It would be impossible, without 
 a general ruin, to compel capital to lose upon the man 
 who is not worth even the minimum wage. How shall 
 that element of insecurity and instability be elimin- 
 177 12 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 ated ? To support the man gratuitously because he 
 cannot earn a minimum wage, when all the rest of the 
 commonwealth is working for its guaranteed wages, 
 is to put a premium upon incapacity and sloth. The 
 man must bemadeto work. Hemustbetaught.if pos- 
 sible, to produce those economic values, which are re- 
 garded as the minimum of sufficiency. He must be 
 kept at that work even if he cannot produce the mini- 
 mum, lest his presence as a free labourer should im- 
 peril the whole scheme of the minimum wage, and 
 introduce at the same time a continuous element of 
 instability. Hence he is necessarily a subject for 
 forced labour. We have not yet in this country,estab- 
 lished by force of law, the right to this form of com- 
 pulsion, but it is an inevitable consequence of those 
 other reforms which have just been reviewed. The 
 "Labour Colony" (a prison so called because euphe- 
 mism is necessary to every transition) will be erected 
 to absorb this surplus, and that last form of compul- 
 sion will crown the edifice of these reforms. They 
 will then be complete so far as the subject classes are 
 concerned, and even though this particular institu- 
 tion of the " Labour Colony " (logically the last of 
 all) precede in time other forms of compulsion, it will 
 make the advent of those other forms of compulsion 
 more certain, facile, and rapid. 
 
 There remains one last remark to be made upon 
 
 178 
 
SERVILE STATE HAS BEGUN 
 
 the concrete side of my subject. I have in this last 
 section illustrated the tendency towards the Servile 
 State from actual laws and actual projects with which 
 all are to-day familiar in English industrial society, 
 and I have shown how these are certainly establish- 
 ing the proletariat in a novel,but to them satisfactory, 
 Servile Status. 
 
 It remains to point out in a very few lines the com- 
 plementary truth that what should be the very essence 
 of Collectivist Reform, to wit, the translation of the 
 meansof production from thehands of private owners 
 to the hands of public officials, is nowhere being at- 
 tempted. So far from its being attempted, all so- 
 called " Socialistic " experiments in municipalisation 
 and nationalisation aremerelyincreasingthedepend- 
 ence of the community upon the Capitalist class. To 
 prove this, we need only observe that every single 
 one of these experiments is effected by a loan. 
 
 Now what is meant in economic reality by these 
 municipal loans and national loans raised for the pur- 
 poseof purchasing certain small sections of the means 
 of production ? 
 
 Certain Capitalists own a number of rails, cars, etc. 
 Theyputto workupon these certain Proletarians, and 
 the result is a certain total of economic values Let 
 the surplus values obtainable by the Capitalists after 
 the subsistence of the proletarians is provided for 
 amountto^io.oooayear. We all know how a system 
 179 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 of this sort is "Municipalised. A "loan" is raised. It 
 bears "interest." It is saddled with a " sinking fund." 
 
 Now this loan is not really made in money, though 
 the terms of it are in money. It is, at the end of a 
 long string of exchanges, nothing more nor less than 
 the loan of the cars, the rails, etc., by the Capitalists 
 to the Municipality. And the Capitalists require, 
 before they will strike the bargain, a guarantee that 
 the whole of their old profit shall be paid to them, to- 
 gether with a further yearly sum, which after a certain 
 number of years shall represent the original value of 
 the concern when they handed it over. These last 
 additional sums are called the " sinking fund" ; the 
 continued payment of the old surplus values is called 
 the " interest." 
 
 In theory certain small sections of the means of 
 production might be acquired in this way. That par- 
 ticular section would have been " socialised." The 
 " Sinking Fund " (that is, the paying of the Capital- 
 ists for their plant by instalments) might be met out 
 of the general taxation imposed on the community, 
 considering how large that is compared with any one 
 experiment of the kind. The "interest" may by good 
 management be met out of the true profits of the 
 tramways. At the end of a certain number of years 
 the community will be in possession of the tramways, 
 will no longer be exploited in this particular by Capi- 
 talism, will have bought out Capitalism from the 
 
 1 80 
 
SERVILE STATE HAS BEGUN 
 
 general taxes, and, in so far as the purchase money 
 paid has been consumed and not saved or invested 
 by the Capitalists, a small measure of "socialisation" 
 will have been achieved. 
 
 As a fact things are never so favourable. 
 
 In practice three conditions militate against even 
 these tiny experiments in expropriation: the fact that 
 the implements are always sold at much more than 
 their true value ; the fact that the purchase includes 
 non-productive things ; and the fact that the rate of 
 borrowing is much faster than the rate of repayment. 
 These three adverse conditions lead in practice to 
 nothing but the riveting of Capitalism more securely 
 round the body of the State. 
 
 For what is it that is paid for when a tramway, 
 for instance, is taken over? Is it the true capital 
 alone, the actual plant, which is paid for, even at an 
 exaggerated price? Far from it! Over and above 
 the rails and the cars, there are all the commissions 
 that have been made, all the champagne luncheons, 
 all the lawyers' fees, all the compensations to this 
 man and to that man, all the bribes. Nor does this 
 exhaust the argument. Tramways represent a pro- 
 ductive investment. What about pleasure gardens, 
 wash-houses, baths, libraries, monuments, and the 
 rest ? The greater part of these things are the pro- 
 duct of" loans." When you put up a public institu- 
 tion you borrow the bricks and the mortar and the 
 181 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 iron and the wood and the tiles from Capitalists, and 
 you pledge yourself to pay interest, and to produce a 
 sinking fund precisely as though a town hall or a bath 
 were a piece of reproductive machinery. 
 
 To this must be added the fact that a considerable 
 proportion of the purchases are failures : purchases 
 of things just before they are driven out by some new 
 invention ; while on the top of the whole business 
 you have the fact that the borrowing goes on at a far 
 greater rate than the repayment. 
 
 In a word, all these experiments up and down 
 Europeduring our generation, municipal and nation- 
 al, have resulted in an indebtedness to capital in- 
 creasing rather more than twice, but not three times, 
 as fast as the rate of repayment. The interest which 
 capital demands with a complete indifference as to 
 whether the loan is productive or non-productive 
 amounts to rather more than \\ per cent, excess over 
 the produce of the various experiments, even though 
 we countin the most lucrative and successful of these, 
 such as the state railways of many countries, and 
 the thoroughly successful municipal enterprises of 
 many modern towns. 
 
 Capitalismhasseentoitthat itshallbea winner and 
 not a loser by this form of sham Socialism, as by every 
 other. And the same forces which in practice forbid 
 confiscation see to it that the attempt to mask con- 
 fiscation by purchase shall not only fail, but shall 
 
 182 
 
SERVILE STATE HAS BEGUN 
 
 turn against those who have not had the courage to 
 make a frontal attack upon privilege. 
 
 With these concrete examples showing how Col- 
 lectivism, in attempting its practice, does but confirm 
 the Capitalist position, and showinghowourlaws have 
 already begun to impose a Servile Status upon the Pro- 
 letariat, I end the argumentative thesis of this book. 
 
 I believe I have proved my case. 
 
 The future of industrial society, and in particular 
 of English society, left to its own direction, is a future 
 in which subsistence and security shall be guaranteed 
 for the Proletariat, but shall be guaranteed at the ex- 
 pense of the old political freedom and by the estab- 
 lishment of that Proletariat in a status really, though 
 not nominally, servile. At the same time, the Own- 
 ers will be guaranteed in their profits, the whole 
 machinery of production in the smoothness of its 
 working, and that stability which has been lost under 
 the Capitalist phase of society will be found once 
 more. 
 
 The internal strains which have threatened society 
 during its Capitalist phase will be relaxed and elimi- 
 nated, and the community will settle down upon that 
 Servile basis which was its foundation before the 
 advent of the Christian faith, from which that faith 
 slowly weaned it, and to which in the decay of that 
 faith it naturally returns. 
 183 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 IT IS POSSIBLE TO PORTRAY A GREAT 
 social movement of the past with accuracy and in 
 detail if one can spare to the task the time necessary 
 for research and further bring to it a certain power of 
 co-ordination by which a great mass of detail can be 
 integrated and made one whole. 
 
 Such a task is rarely accomplished, but it does not 
 exceed the powers of history. 
 
 With regard to the future it is otherwise. No one 
 can say even in its largest aspect or upon its chief 
 structural line what that future will be. He can only 
 present the main tendencies of his time: he can only 
 determinetheequationof the curve and presume that 
 thatequation will apply more or less to its next devel- 
 opments. 
 
 So far as I can judge, those societies which broke 
 with thecontinuityof Christian civilisation in the six- 
 teenth century — which means, roughly, North Ger- 
 many and Great Britain — tend at present to the re- 
 establishment of a Servile Status. It will be diversi- 
 fied by local accident, modified by local character, 
 hidden under many forms. But it will come. 
 
 That the mere Capitalist anarchy cannot endure 
 is patent to all men. That only a very few possible 
 solutions to it exist should be equally patent to all. 
 For my part, as I have said in these pages, I do not 
 believe there are more than two : a reaction towards 
 well-divided property, or the re-establishment of ser- 
 187 
 
THE SERVILE STATE 
 
 vitude. I cannot believe that theoretical Collectiv- 
 ism, now so plainly failing, will ever inform a real and 
 living society. 
 
 But my conviction that the re-establishment of the 
 Servile Status in industrial society is actually upon 
 us does not lead me to any meagre and mechanical 
 prophecy of what the future of Europe shall be. The 
 force of which I have been speaking is not the only 
 force in the field. There is a complex knot of forces 
 underlyinganynation once Christian; a smouldering 
 of the old fires. 
 
 Moreover, one can point to European societies 
 which will most certainly reject any such solution of 
 our Capitalist problem, just as the same societies have 
 eitherrejected,orlived suspiciousof,Capitalism itself, 
 andhaverejectedor lived suspicious of that industrial 
 organisation which till lately identified itself with 
 " progress " and national well-being. 
 
 These societies are in the main the same as those 
 which, in that great storm of the sixteenth century, 
 — the capital episode in the story of Christendom — 
 held fast to tradition and saved the continuity of 
 morals. Chief among them should be noted to-day 
 the French and the Irish. 
 
 I would record it as an impression (and no more) 
 that the Servile State, strong as the tide is making 
 for it in Prussia and in England to-day,will be modified, 
 checked, perhaps defeated in war, certainly halted 
 
 188 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 in its attempt to establish itself completely, by the 
 strong reaction which these freer societies upon its 
 flank will perpetually exercise. 
 
 Ireland has decided for a free peasantry, and our 
 generation has seen the solid foundation of that insti- 
 tution laid. In France the many experiments which 
 elsewhere have successfully introduced the Servile 
 State have been contemptuously rejected by thepopu- 
 lace,and (most significant!) a recent attempt to regis- 
 ter and to "insure" the artisans as a separate category 
 of citizens has broken down in the face of an universal 
 and a virile contempt. 
 
 That this second factor in the development of the 
 future, the presence of free societies, will destroy the 
 tendency to the Servile State elsewhere I do not 
 affirm, but I believe that it will modify that tendency, 
 certainly by example and perhaps by direct attack. 
 And as I am upon the whole hopeful that the Faith 
 will recover its intimate and guiding place in the heart 
 of Europe, so I believe that this sinking back into our 
 original Paganism (for the tendency to the Servile 
 State is nothing less) will in due time be halted and 
 reversed. 
 
 Videat Deus. 
 
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__ „_ Cornell University Library 
 
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 The servile state, 
 
 3 1924 013 586 049