The Servile State Hilaire Belloc (ebook reader macos TXT) 📖

work of public clerks and marshalled by powerful heads of departments 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 possibly 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 cannot do so. He would have to confiscate just as the more hearty socialist would; and if that act is very difficult to the man burning at the sight of human wrongs, how much more difficult is it to a man impelled by no such motive force and directed by nothing more intense than a mechanical appetite for regulation?

He cannot confiscate or begin to confiscate. At the 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 proper place, a system impossible of general application.

But all those other things for which such a man cares much more than he does for the socialisation of the means of production⁠—tabulation, detailed administration of men, the coordination of many efforts under one schedule, the elimination of all private power to react against his department, all these are immediately obtainable without disturbing the existing arrangement of society. With him, precisely as with the other socialist, what he desires can be reached without any dispossession of the few existing possessors. He has but to secure the registration of the proletariat; next to ensure that neither they in the exercise of their freedom, nor the employer in the exercise of his, can produce insufficiency or insecurity⁠—and he is content. Let laws exist which make the proper housing, feeding, clothing, and recreation of the proletarian mass be incumbent upon the possessing class, and the observance of such rules be imposed, by inspection and punishment, upon those whom he pretends 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 alternative to his ideal collectivist state, which alternative he is quite prepared to accept and regards favourably. Already the greater part of such reformers who, a generation ago, would have called themselves “socialists” 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 proletariat 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 fallen into the servile state by a miscalculation. He has fathered it; he welcomes its birth, he foresees his power over its future.

So much for the socialist movement, which a generation ago proposed to transform our capitalist society into one where the community should be the universal owner and all men equally economically free or unfree under its tutelage. Today 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 socialist 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 greatest weight today. He also is making for the servile 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 details 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 abstract dogma of yours, yet in practice you must admit that it does good. If you had practical experience of the misery of the Jones’ family, or had done 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 suffering from the same twin disabilities which stamp the practical man where-ever found: these twin disabilities are an inability to define his own first principles and an inability to 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 superiors 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 insecurity. 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, insecurity and 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 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, like any donkey to his grazing ground? To those dull and shortsighted eyes the immediate solution which even