Mother Country

by Marilynne Robinson

  Ralf Dahrendorf, in his book On Britain, quotes respectfully as follows from a book titled Equality, coauthored by Keith Joseph, an important political figure in the Thatcher government: “Ultimately the capacity of any society to look after its poor is dependent on the total amount of its wealth, however distributed.” One might object that the way in which wealth is distributed determines, in a society, how numerous “its poor” will be. To distribute wealth away from employed people, as the British do, creates poverty, which must be looked after, perpetuating the ancient relation of those who work to those who employ, which has analogues, or cousins, in slavery and forced labor.

  In the 1880s a philanthropic businessman named Charles Booth launched on a survey of the poor of London, with the purpose of refuting socialist assertions that a million Londoners, one fourth of the population, lived in deep poverty. He continued his project for seventeen years, in the course of it concluding that the extent of poverty had in fact been understated. His work, titled Life and Labour of the People in London, had a considerable significance for modern British socialism, in part because Beatrice Webb, the indefatigable propagandist and guiding spirit of Fabianism, cut her teeth in assisting these researches, and in part because Booth’s work stands in the direct line of descent of British social and economic thought, specifically identifying the institutions and functions of Poor Law as socialism. Booth and the Webbs were associates of William Beveridge in his early career. Booth, like Beveridge, was a Liberal, in Britain the name of a party of bare-knuckled laissez-faire-ists, without any trace of what Americans call liberalism. This is considered an irony of British history, the importance of such people in the emergence of the Welfare State. It is no irony. Like all reformers before them, they undertook to design a good and harmonious state based on stabilizing the poor in a salubrious poverty.

  Booth was a man of conscience, an advocate of reform, a visionary of the kind with which British history has long been replete. He dreamed of a day when “the streets of our Jerusalem may sing with joy.”

  Americans are often said to have a dream. It has never been clear to me just what I and my nation—Armenian dentists in San Diego, Norwegian Avon ladies in St. Paul, black nuns in New Orleans—fall to dreaming about so universally and persistently. The common wisdom is that we dream of personal success and prosperity. But we all know that those freshly arrived in this dreamy nation succeed and prosper at a rate that makes slouches of the rest of us, and that the naturalization of their children into our culture has no more striking feature than this tendency to drift downward from the heights of aspiration. So when these newcomers fall to dreaming along with the rest of us, what do they dream about? Personal sanctity, perfect crime, beautiful lovers, the admiration of their family, a house in the country, physical persons that mark them as vigorous, alert, temperate, and self-sufficient. It seems to me that people’s dreams lie along the grain of their expectations, in general, so that chefs dream of owning restaurants, rabbis of being highly esteemed rabbis—in other words, that in America goal-oriented dreaming is as diverse as individual circumstance.

  There is, however, a British dream—though I have never seen the phrase anywhere before. It is an anxiety dream, of the lean kine eating the fat. Joseph in the Old Testament is summoned to interpret a dream of Pharaoh’s, that seven fat cattle are eaten by seven lean ones, and that seven good ears of corn are eaten by seven poor ones. In the midst of plenty, Pharaoh has had a dream of famine. He assigns Joseph to store grain for seven years, in preparation for seven bad years, and disaster is averted. A glance at the world will assure one instantly that the dreams of cultures are much more typically urgent and recurrent anxiety dreams than the sort of delusional daydreaming Americans are said to be prone to.

  In the British version of Pharaoh’s dream, the lean kine are the poorest members of the population, who have half devoured the class just above them. The British, a practical race, and one whose prophets have warned them of the exponential increase in the numbers of lean kine, so that they have not enjoyed the assurance given to Pharaoh that his troubles would sometime end, have taken practical steps—in the thick of the dream, of course, from which they have never wakened. It was in his prosperity that this warning came to Pharaoh, and it has been through the centuries of British prosperity that their dream has haunted them. And here is the strange part, the place where British experience departs unequivocally from its biblical analogue. The very thrift and saving required to keep disaster at bay actually increased the numbers of lean kine and their voracity and—if I do not overstep the strange metaphor unpardonably—their rage. The alternative, as Malthus and others were quick to point out, was to feed the creatures, thereby accelerating their increase in numbers, without finally diminishing their voracity. Wealth does not deserve the name which must constantly be guarded and worried over, and the British, however rich, have always felt poor. But with Charles Booth we have arrived at that cusp, that threshold moment, when capitalist Britain is about to emerge as socialist Britain, and the nightmare is finally about to end. If we pause here we can witness this epochal change. It requires careful watching, for there is as little change to the outward eye as there is in bread after consecration.

  Though Booth himself was no socialist, he proposed that socialist institutions—prisons, poorhouses—might act as a catchment for those elements which cannot function in an individualist culture. In what particular this would depart from the state of things then prevailing I cannot tell.

  Friedrich Engels’s study of the conditions of the working class in Manchester tends to describe streets and quarters—how they were built, how populated, what sanitary conditions prevailed in them—or to describe categories of workers and factory conditions. Booth turned much of his attention to families, which he describes in terms of their cleanliness, thrift, and sobriety, the presence or absence of which correlates with their class ranking on a scale of his own devising. Just as Engels’s method reflects his belief that the working class were victims of their circumstances, Booth’s reflects the more usual assumption that moral failure is the great cause of distress, with the inevitable corollary that poverty, if it is done right, is entirely consistent with happiness and well-being. Thus, for Booth, the cause of misery is found in the miserable. Charles Booth did not, however, foresee abandoning the feckless to their misery—they were, after all, a drain on the economy: “Ill-paid and half-starved as they are, they consume or waste or have expended on them more wealth than they create.”

  His solution will sound familiar. Class A, his designation for “the lowest class of occasional labourers, loafers, and semi-criminals,” could be “gradually harried out of existence.” The more fortunate Class B, the “ill-paid and half-starved,” are still, in Booth’s elegant phrase, du trop, a phrase that should surely be translated as “redundant.” His scheme for eliminating this class is gentler than harrying them out of existence, though not by much. In his view, “if they were ruled out we should be much better off than we are now; and if this class were under State tutelage—say at once under State slavery—the balance-sheet would be more favorable to the community.” Like Carlyle, he considers slavery a humane reform, but unreachable. For him the difficulty lies “in the question of individual liberty, for it is as freemen, and not as slaves, that we must deal with them. The only form compulsion could assume would be that of making life otherwise impossible; an enforcement of the standard of life which would oblige every one of us to accept the relief of the State in the manner prescribed by the State, unless we were able and willing to conform to this standard. The life offered would not be attractive.”

  Let us pause here to note certain features of this plan. First, the social amelioration it has as its object would “rule out” a class of people who supposedly represent a drag on the economy of a nation which was at that time the richest in the world, and in the history of the world. The shared characteristic that defines them as a class according to Booth’s system is their extre
me poverty, which, as he freely grants, can be brought on by illness or accident. Nevertheless, they are “as freemen” to be compelled to “accept a regulated life,” in “industrial groups, planted wherever building materials were cheap.” Granting that these groups would not be economically competitive, “it would be merely that the State, having these people on its hands, obtained whatever value it could out of their work. They would become servants of the State.” Accounts should be kept of the value produced by each family, expressed as deficiency, of course, since the enterprise would not be profitable. “It would, moreover, be necessary to set a limit to the current deficiency submitted to by the State, and when the account of any family reached this point to move them on to the poorhouse where they would live as a family no longer. The Socialistic side of life as it is includes the poorhouse and the prison, and the whole system, as I conceive it, would provide within itself motives in favour of prudence, and a sufficient pressure to stimulate industry.”

  The thing most striking about this proposal is that there is nothing new in it. It criminalizes poverty, making poverty entail penal servitude. Like the fourteenth-century Ordinance of Labourers, it assumes that those who do not work continuously are, even in their misery, an expense to the state, and that the state has a right to make the balance sheet more favorable by seizing upon their labor. One wonders what form coercion would take if it were not limited by the “freedom” of its objects. The use of separation of family members as leverage on their behavior—specincally, in extracting economic value—was a feature of the New Poor Law of 1834, notorious and widely practiced. Even infants and mothers were separated. Booth is simply pointing out that the poorhouse, a part of “the Socialistic side of life as it is,” would still have terrors for his Class B “sufficient to stimulate industry.” Booth’s scheme would merely extend the sanctions against pauperism to include those who had eluded that status by scrounging and suffering, through religious or private charity, or through the openhandedness of the more fortunate poor. Like the old vagabonds, they would be punished in anticipation of transgression, for “to bring Class B under State regulation would be to control the springs of pauperism.” Booth offers in support of his proposed reforms to eliminate the non-productive classes the observation that “the Socialists think it can be done by self-devotion on the part of the capable, and a final sternness which shall enforce obedience by the threat of starvation.”

  One can only envy the clean conscience a society must enjoy that so infallibly locates the sources of social problems in those who suffer them. If poverty is a transgression, it is one of which British opinion makers have always been, to an extraordinary degree, innocent—they need hardly fear disadvantage if they should sometime be measured as they mete. Yet to accuse them of a lack of fellow feeling with the poor is clearly wrong. They assume in the poor emotions they find most estimable in themselves, notably love of country and love of family. We are assured of this by their confident use of the threats of forced emigration, and separation of families, in regulating the poor.

  There was, as I have said, a Minerva fully armed, growing within the squamous limits of Booth’s undertaking, by which I mean, of course, Beatrice Webb, at that time still the parthenic Beatrice Potter, who, with her future husband, Sydney, would become the dominant spirit in the Fabian Society, the most characteristic and influential school of English socialism. She was the niece of Booth’s wife, the daughter of a wealthy manufacturing family, and her curious lot had been to have her education entirely at the hands of Herbert Spencer, exponent of Social Darwinism.

  One is supposed to admire the Fabians, just as one is supposed to admire English socialism. The entire Fabian corpus reads as if printed in embalmer’s fluid. And, as with Marxism or Structuralism, the tediousness of the prose acts as a defense of the ideas expressed in it, since none but the devout can endure reading it.

  Beatrice Webb wrote the chapter in Booth’s study devoted to the Jews of London. It is uncharacteristically lucid and evocative, and—by the standards of the whole work—eminently fair. Jews were clean, sober, literate, frugal, hardworking, debt-paying, and, relative to the larger community at least, independent. They were imbued with every grace Booth’s study was meant to measure, and Webb allows as much.

  The late nineteenth century was a period of Jewish immigration to London from Russia and Poland. The Jewish community of London established a Board of Guardians to provide for their poor, who were of course very numerous. Not surprisingly, considering the mentality at work, this arrangement was attacked in the London press as creating Jewish pauperism—since to receive assistance has long had, in the British mind, a disastrous and nearly irreversible impact on the human character. This “demoralization” will obsess Beatrice Webb. That it is an authentic and important phenomenon she never seems to doubt, and no wonder, since it has been a part of the prevailing view of man and society in Britain over centuries. So the Jews, in the seemingly unexceptionable course of taking responsibility for their own poor, were seen to be creating a “pauperized,” that is, a demoralized or degraded, population.

  Webb defends them, however. She says it is unfair to describe the providing of free funerals as proof of pauperization, because of the “peculiar solemnity of mourning and funeral rites among Jews, and the direct and indirect costliness” of them. Now, as it happens, nothing seems to have mattered more to the Gentile or Christian Londoner than his own or a relative’s funeral. Working-class people, even young children, joined “death clubs” to pay the cost of their own funerals which, even after the Second World War, in William Beveridge’s terms, behaved as a necessity. That is, people would keep up their payments through hell and high water. Booth reports that poor people felt it a point of honor to bury someone in the best style his savings would permit. In the previous century the bodies of deceased paupers had been dumped in open pits. This no doubt accounted for the passion of the poor for funerals, while establishing in the official mind a standard of economy never again to be attained.

  One of the lesser Fabians will suggest that the cost of working-class funerals, to be assumed by the state, should then be lowered by introducing mass production of coffin handles. This is an early and characteristic example of the eagerness of British socialists to use state services to control and depress working-class consumption.

  Again remarkably, Webb defends Jewish charitable practices on the grounds that they consist largely of “business capital of one kind or another, enabling the recipients to raise themselves permanently from the ranks of those who depend on charity for subsistence.” She does not conclude that the phenomenon of pauperism might be perpetuated among other Londoners by the meager and abusive charity they enjoy at the hands of their Christian nation.

  Yet among the poor themselves there is a generosity so considerable as to defeat these philanthropists’ hopes of rooting out pauperism by controlling charity. Webb frets that, while the Jews can keep good records of those they relieve, “owing to the fact that our indigent parasites are to a great extent maintained by the silent aid of the class immediately above them, we can by no possible means arrive at an approximate estimate of the number of persons in our midst who depend on charitable assistance for their livelihood.” That these “parasites” avoid the legal status of pauper merely frustrates her. While they exist they offend.

  After all she has said in their favor, the future Beatrice Webb cannot finally approve of the London Jews and their philanthropy. Despite its apparent success, it is socially destructive, because “if we help a man to exist without work, we demoralize the individual and encourage the growth of a parasitic or pauper class. If, on the other hand, we raise the recipient permanently from the condition of penury, and enable him to begin again his struggle for existence, we save him at the cost of all who compete with him …” The impact of the Jew is therefore finally destructive, “for the reader will have already perceived that the immigrant Jew, though possessed of many first-class virtues, is deficient in
that highest and latest development of human sentiment—social morality.” Inured to deep poverty, he will underbid other workers without the restraints of “class loyalty and trade integrity,” thereby lowering wages—“without pride, without preference, without interests outside the struggle for the existence and welfare of the individual and the family.” These are the same people who, a few pages before, were faulted for their ready and substantial philanthropy.

  Having documented exceptional independence and prosperity, she concludes sepulchrally, “In the Jewish East End trades we may watch the prophetic deduction of the Hebrew economist [she means Ricardo] fulfilled—in a perpetually recurring bare subsistence wage for the great majority of manual workers”—writing here for all the world as if Ricardo’s prophetic deduction were not fulfilled in every corner of Britain.

  Consistency is not the point. The point is to discredit the phenomena of self-help and social mobility, to find positive harm in them despite any apparent good. That Karl Marx, an immigrant Jew in London, should have attached such value to these things in his final chapter of Capital seems natural enough in light of the community Beatrice Webb describes here. It is her view that has carried the day. “Marxists” cleave to her Ricardian definition of “class loyalty” as if it were an article of the true faith.