The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

by Robert Tressell

  ‘I do not intend to dwell upon this point at length, but in support of what I have said I will quote as nearly as I can from memory the words of the historian Froude.

  ‘“I do not believe,” says Mr Froude, “that the condition of the people in Mediaeval Europe was as miserable as is pretended. I do not believe that the distribution of the necessaries of life was as unequal as it is at present. If the tenant lived hard, the lord had little luxury. Earls and countesses breakfasted at five in the morning, on salt beef and herring, a slice of bread and a draught of ale from a blackjack. Lords and servants dined in the same hall and shared the same meal.”

  ‘When we arrive at the system that displaced Feudalism, we find that the condition of the workers was better in every way than it is at present. The instruments of production – the primitive machinery and the tools necessary for the creation of wealth – belonged to the skilled workers who used them, and the things they produced were also the property of those who made them.

  ‘In those days a master painter, a master shoemaker, a master saddler, or any other master tradesmen, was really a skilled artisan working on his own account. He usually had one or two apprentices, who were socially his equals, eating at the same table and associating with the other members of his family. It was quite a common occurrence for the apprentice – after he had attained proficiency in his work – to marry his master’s daughter and succeed to his master’s business. In those days to be a “master” tradesman meant to be master of the trade, not merely of some underpaid drudges in one’s employment. The apprentices were there to master the trade, qualifying themselves to become master workers themselves; not mere sweaters and exploiters of the labour of others, but useful members of society. In those days, because there was no labour-saving machinery the community was dependent for its existence on the productions of hand labour. Consequently the majority of the people were employed in some kind of productive work, and the workers were honoured and respected citizens, living in comfort on the fruits of their labour. They were not rich as we understand wealth now, but they did not starve and they were not regarded with contempt, as are their successors of today.

  ‘The next great change came with the introduction of steam machinery. That power came to the aid of mankind in their struggle for existence, enabling them to create easily and in abundance those things of which they had previously been able to produce only a bare sufficiency. A wonderful power – equalling and surpassing the marvels that were imagined by the writers of fairy tales and Eastern stories – a power so vast – so marvellous, that it is difficult to find words to convey anything like an adequate conception of it.

  ‘We all remember the story, in The Arabian Nights, of Aladdin, who in his poverty became possessed of the Wonderful Lamp and – he was poor no longer. He merely had to rub the Lamp – the Genie appeared, and at Aladdin’s command he produced an abundance of everything that the youth could ask or dream of. With the discovery of steam machinery, mankind became possessed of a similar power to that imagined by the Eastern writer. At the command of its masters the Wonderful Lamp of Machinery produces an enormous, overwhelming, stupendous abundance and superfluity of every material thing necessary for human existence and happiness. With less labour than was formerly required to cultivate acres, we can now cultivate miles of land. In response to human industry, aided by science and machinery, the fruitful earth teems with such lavish abundance as was never known or deemed possible before. If you go into the different factories and workshops you will see prodigious quantities of commodities of every kind pouring out of the wonderful machinery, literally like water from a tap.

  ‘One would naturally and reasonably suppose that the discovery or invention of such an aid to human industry would result in increased happiness and comfort for everyone; but as you all know, the reverse is the case; and the reason of that extraordinary result, is the reason of all the poverty and unhappiness that we see around us and endure today – It is simply because – the machinery became the property of a comparatively few individuals and private companies, who use it not for the benefit of the community but to create profits for themselves.

  ‘As this labour-saving machinery became more extensively used, the prosperous class of skilled workers gradually disappeared. Some of the wealthier of them became distributors instead of producers of wealth; that is to say, they became shopkeepers, retailing the commodities that were produced for the most part by machinery. But the majority of them in course of time degenerated into a class of mere wage earners, having no property in the machines they used, and no property in the things they made.

  ‘They sold their labour for so much per hour, and when they could not find any employer to buy it from them, they were reduced to destitution.

  ‘Whilst the unemployed workers were starving and those in employment not much better off, the individuals and private companies who owned the machinery accumulated fortunes; but their profits were diminished and their working expenses increased by what led to the latest great change in the organization of the production of the necessaries of life – the formation of the Limited Companies and the Trusts; the decision of the private companies to combine and co-operate with each other in order to increase their profits and decrease their working expenses. The results of these combines have been – an increase in the quantities of the things produced: a decrease in the number of wage earners employed – and enormously increased profits for the shareholders.

  ‘But it is not only the wage-earning class that is being hurt; for while they are being annihilated by the machinery and the efficient organization of industry by the trusts that control and are beginning to monopolize production, the shopkeeping classes are also being slowly but surely crushed out of existence by the huge companies that are able by the greater magnitude of their operations to buy and sell more cheaply than the small traders.

  ‘The consequence of all this is that the majority of the people are in a condition of more or less abject poverty – living from hand to mouth. It is an admitted fact that about thirteen millions of our people are always on the verge of starvation. The significant results of this poverty face us on every side. The alarming and persistent increase of insanity. The large number of would-be recruits for the army who have to be rejected because they are physically unfit; and the shameful condition of the children of the poor. More than one-third of the children of the working classes in London have some sort of mental or physical defect; defects in development; defects of eyesight; abnormal nervousness; rickets, and mental dullness. The difference in height and weight and general condition of the children in poor schools and the children of the so-called better classes, constitutes a crime that calls aloud to Heaven for vengeance upon those who are responsible for it.

  ‘It is childish to imagine that any measure of Tariff Reform or Political Reform such as a paltry tax on foreign-made goods or abolishing the House of Lords, or disestablishing the Church – or miserable Old Age Pensions, or a contemptible tax on land, can deal with such a state of affairs as this. They have no House of Lords in America or France, and yet their condition is not materially different from ours. You may be deceived into thinking that such measures as those are great things. You may fight for them and vote for them, but after you have got them you will find that they will make no appreciable improvement in your condition. You will still have to slave and drudge to gain a bare sufficiency of the necessaries of life. You will still have to eat the same kind of food and wear the same kind of clothes and boots as now. Your masters will still have you in their power to insult and sweat and drive. Your general condition will be just the same as at present because such measures as those are not remedies but red herrings, intended by those who trail them to draw us away from the only remedy, which is to be found only in the Public Ownership of the Machinery, and the National Organization of Industry for the production and distribution of the necessaries of life, not for the profit of a few but for the benefit of all!

 
‘That is the next great change; not merely desirable, but imperatively necessary and inevitable! That is Socialism!

  ‘It is not a wild dream of Superhuman Unselfishness. No one will be asked to sacrifice himself for the benefit of others or to love his neighbours better than himself as is the case under the present system, which demands that the majority shall unselfishly be content to labour and live in wretchedness for the benefit of a few. There is no such principle of Philanthropy in Socialism, which simply means that even as all industries are now owned by shareholders, and organized and directed by committees and officers elected by the shareholders, so shall they in future belong to the State, that is, the whole people – and they shall be organized and directed by committees and officers elected by the community.

  ‘Under existing circumstances the community is exposed to the danger of being invaded and robbed and massacred by some foreign power. Therefore the community has organized and owns and controls an Army and Navy to protect it from that danger. Under existing circumstances the community is menaced by another equally great danger – the people are mentally and physically degenerating from lack of proper food and clothing. Socialists say that the community should undertake and organize the business of producing and distributing all these things; that the State should be the only employer of labour and should own all the factories, mills, mines, farms, railways, fishing fleets, sheep farms, poultry farms and cattle ranches.

  ‘Under existing circumstances the community is degenerating mentally and physically because the majority cannot afford to have decent houses to live in. Socialists say that the community should take in hand the business of providing proper houses for all its members, that the State should be the only landlord, that all the land and all the houses should belong to the whole people…

  [‘We must do this] if we are to keep our old place in the van of human progress. A nation of ignorant, unintelligent, half-starved, broken-spirited degenerates cannot hope to lead humanity in its never-ceasing march onward to the conquest of the future.

  ‘Vain, mightiest fleet of iron framed;

  Vain those all-shattering guns

  Unless proud England keep, untamed,

  The stout hearts of her sons.

  ‘All the evils that I have referred to are only symptoms of the one disease that is sapping the moral, mental and physical life of the nation, and all attempts to cure these symptoms are foredoomed to failure, simply because they are the symptoms and not the disease. All the talk of Temperance, and the attempts to compel temperance, are foredoomed to failure, because drunkenness is a symptom, and not the disease.

  ‘India is a rich productive country. Every year millions of pounds worth of wealth are produced by her people, only to be stolen from them by means of the Money Trick by the capitalist and official class. Her industrious sons and daughters, who are nearly all total abstainers, live in abject poverty, and their misery is not caused by laziness or want of thrift, or by Intemperance. They are poor for the same reason that we are poor – Because we are Robbed.

  ‘The hundreds of thousands of pounds that are yearly wasted in well-meant but useless charity accomplish no lasting good, because while charity soothes the symptoms it ignores the disease, which is – the PRIVATE OWNERSHIP of the means of producing the necessaries of life, and the restriction of production, by a few selfish individuals for their own profit. And for that disease there is no other remedy than the one I have told you of – the PUBLIC OWNERSHIP and cultivation of the land, the PUBLIC OWNERSHIP of the mines, railways, canals, ships, factories and all the other means of production, and the establishment of an Industrial Civil Service – a National Army of Industry – for the purpose of producing the necessaries, comforts and refinements of life in that abundance which has been made possible by science and machinery – for the use and benefit of the whole of the people.’

  ‘Yes: and where’s the money to come from for all this?’ shouted Crass, fiercely.

  ‘Hear, hear,’ cried the man behind the moat.

  ‘There’s no money difficulty about it,’ replied Barrington. ‘We can easily find all the money we shall need.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Slyme, who had been reading the Daily Ananias, ‘there’s all the money in the Post Office Savings Bank. The Socialists could steal that for a start; and as for the mines and land and factories, they can all be took from the owners by force.’

  ‘There will be no need for force and no need to steal anything from anybody.’

  ‘And there’s another thing I objects to,’ said Crass. ‘And that’s all this ’ere talk about hignorance: wot about all the money wots spent every year for edication?’

  ‘You should rather say – “What about all the money that’s wasted every year on education?” What can be more brutal and senseless than trying to “educate” a poor little, hungry, ill-clad child? Such so-called “instruction” is like the seed in the parable of the Sower, which fell on stony ground and withered away because it had no depth of earth; and even in those cases where it does take root and grow, it becomes like the seed that fell among thorns and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it bore no fruit.

  ‘The majority of us forget in a year or two all that we learnt at school because the conditions of our lives are such as to destroy all inclination for culture or refinement. We must see that the children are properly clothed and fed and that they are not made to get up in the middle of the night to go to work for several hours before they go to school. We must make it illegal for any greedy, heartless profit-hunter to hire them and make them labour for several hours in the evening after school, or all day and till nearly midnight on Saturday. We must first see that our children are cared for, as well as the children of savage races, before we can expect a proper return for the money that we spend on education.’

  ‘I don’t mind admitting that this ’ere scheme of national ownership and industries is all right if it could only be done,’ said Harlow, ‘but at present, all the land, railways and factories, belongs to private capitalists; they can’t be bought without money, and you say you ain’t goin’ to take ’em away by force, so I should like to know how the bloody ’ell you are goin’ to get ’em?’

  ‘We certainly don’t propose to buy them with money, for the simple reason that there is not sufficient money in existence to pay for them.

  ‘If all the gold and silver money in the World were gathered together into one heap, it would scarcely be sufficient to buy all the private property in England. The people who own all these things now never really paid for them with money – they obtained possession of them by means of the “Money Trick” which Owen explained to us some time ago.’

  ‘They obtained possession of them by usin’ their brains,’ said Crass.

  ‘Exactly,’ replied the lecturer. ‘They tell us themselves that that is how they got them away from us; they call their profits the “wages of intelligence”. Whilst we have been working, they have been using their intelligence in order to obtain possession of the things we have created. The time has now arrived for us to use our intelligence in order to get back the things they have robbed us of, and to prevent them from robbing us any more. As for how it is to be done, we might copy the methods that they have found so successful.’

  ‘Oh, then you do mean to rob them after all,’ cried Slyme, triumphantly. ‘If it’s true that they robbed the workers, and if we’re to adopt the same method then we’ll be robbers too!’

  ‘When a thief is caught having in his possession the property of others it is not robbery to take the things away from him and to restore them to their rightful owners,’ retorted Barrington.

  ‘I can’t allow this ’ere disorder to go on no longer,’ shouted Philpot, banging the table with the plumber’s hammer as several men began talking at the same time.

  ‘There will be plenty of tuneropperty for questions and opposition at the hend of the horation, when the pulpit will be throwed open to anyone as likes to debate the question. I now cal
ls upon the professor to proceed with the second part of the horation: and anyone wot interrupts will get a lick under the ear-’ole with this’ – waving the hammer – ‘and the body will be chucked out of the bloody winder.’

  Loud cheers greeted this announcement. It was still raining heavily, so they thought they might as well pass the time listening to Barrington as in any other way.

  ‘A large part of the land may be got back in the same way as it was taken from us. The ancestors of the present holders obtained possession of it by simply passing Acts of Enclosure: the nation should regain possession of those lands by passing Acts of Resumption. And with regard to the other land, the present holders should be allowed to retain possession of it during their lives and then it should revert to the State, to be used for the benefit of all. Britain should belong to the British people, not to a few selfish individuals. As for the railways, they have already been nationalized in some other countries, and what other countries can do we can do also. In New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Japan and some other countries some of the railways are already the property of the State. As for the method by which we can obtain possession of them, the difficulty is not to discover a method, but rather to decide which of many methods we shall adopt. One method would be to simply pass an Act declaring that as it was contrary to the public interest that they should be owned by private individuals, the railways would henceforth be the property of the nation. All railways servants, managers and officials would continue in their employment; the only difference being that they would now be in the employ of the State. As to the shareholders –’

  ‘They could all be knocked on the ’ead, I suppose,’ interrupted Crass.

  ‘Or go to the workhouse,’ said Slyme.

  ‘Or to ’ell,’ suggested the man behind the moat.

  ‘– The State would continue to pay to the shareholders the same dividents they had received on an average for, say, the previous three years. These payments would be continued to the present shareholders for life, or the payments might be limited to a stated number of years and the shares would be made non-transferable, like the railway tickets of today. As for the factories, shops, and other means of production and distribution, the State must adopt the same methods of doing business as the present owners. I mean that even as the big Trusts and companies are crushing – by competition – the individual workers and small traders, so the State should crush the trusts by competition. It is surely justifiable for the State to do for the benefit of the whole people that which the capitalists are already doing for the profit of a few shareholders. The first step in this direction will be the establishment of Retail Stores for the purpose of supplying all national and municipal employees with the necessaries of life at the lowest possible prices. At first the Administration will purchase these things from the private manufacturers, in such large quantities that it will be able to obtain them at the very cheapest rate, and as there will be no heavy rents to pay for showy shops, and no advertising expenses, and as the object of the Administration will be not to make profit, but to supply its workmen and officials with goods at the lowest price, they will be able to sell them much cheaper than the profit-making private stores.