Chapter I. Introductory

During the contest we have seen the best men in all the countries concerned--the best in strength of body, courage and devotion suffering untold hardships, wounds and death, while the next best and the worst have stayed at home and have in many cases made large II 12 THE CASE FOR CAPITALISM fortunes, or greatly increased their wealth. A world crisis which ends in enormous destruction of life and property, and at the same time in the enriching of many of those who were not goodenough, in mind and body, to risk their lives to meet it, seems to be a piece of sheer stupidity and injustice. It is no wonder that many itD:patient minds are driven to the con clusion that every institution which existed at the time when these crimes and absurdities were perpetrated should be cut down, rooted out and cast upon the dust heap. Is this state of mind a goc:d one in which to set out on the ta~k of. mending' the breaches that have been made in the walls of the build ing in which we have lived? Is it wise, because the building has been found not to be proof against the .weather, to pull it down in disgust and start making a' new one to a new plan and on a new system of mechanics which has never been tested and may turn out a home ~hat will not even stand up? Might it not be better to improve the old one? The need f-or amend mentis now admitted by the great majority.

The only question to be decided is whether the changes made are to be on lines that have produced a working result; or to be based on· imaginative dreams which tell us how much INTRODUCTORY 13 better everything might be if we worked under a new system, which has only been sketched in hazy outline, about which its advocates have shown much unanimity in disagreeing. They want to see a world in which· everyone will have a fair chance of a real life; so do most of us. They want to turn everything upside down in order to get it; and they may be right. But, if they are wrong, their experiment will work disaster. If we can get the same result along lines that have been tried, is it not safer to work along them and· avoid this risk? The present system under which we work and exchange our work for that of others is that commonly described as Capitalism. Under it each one, male or female, can choose what work he will try to do and what employer he will try to serve; if he does not like his job or his employer, he can leave it or him and try to get another. He cannot earn unless he can do work that somebody wants "to buy, and so he competes with all other workers in producing goods or services that others want and will pay for. His reward depends on the success with which he can satisfy the wants of others.

Whatever money he earns in return for his labour he can spend as he chooses on the pur chase of goods and services for his own use or 14 THE CASE FOR CAPITALISM for that of his dependents, or he can· invest it in opening up a business or industry on his own account, or in shares and debts of public companies, and debts of Governments or public bodies; these securities will pay him a rate of profit or interest if the, companies or debtors prosper and are solvent. Whatever money he earns by labour or by inve~tm~nt he can, after paying such taxes on it as the State demands, hand on to any heirs whom he may name. The system is thus based on private property, competition, individual effort, individual re sponsibility and individual choice. Under it, all men'and women are more or less often faced by problems which they have to' decide, and, according as their decision is right or wrong, their welfare and that of their dependents will wax or wane. It is thus very stimulating and bracing, and might be expected to bring out the best effort of the individual to do good work that win be well paid so that he, and his may prosper and multiply. If only everyone had a fair start and began life with an equal chance of turning his industry and powers to good account, it would be difficult to devise a scheme of economic life more likely to produce great results from human' nature as it, now is ; by stimulating its instincts for gain and, rivalry INTRODUCTORY 15 to a great output of goods and services and by sharpening its faculties, not only for exercise in this purely material useJ but also for solving the bigger problems of life and human intercourse that lie behind it.

In fact, however, this ·system of Capitalism is at present perhaps more widely criticized and abused than any .other human institution. And with some reason, for many of its results have been bad, and there is room for great improve mentwhich criticislncan help, But 'criticism that is bad-tempered' and unreasonable will do more harm than· good. The people who are working on this grea~ business of producing, distributing and consuming the world's wealth are, in the mass, ordinary human beings, with the good and bad qJ.lalitie~· of ordinary folk: The. ordinary man. and woman. is an honest, good-natured person who,.though not too eager to work very hard, does not want to rob any body else. If· this were not so, society could not exist, and progress wo.uld have been im possible. If it be true-as some advocates of Socialism maintain-that· Capitalists live by robbing workers of goods which they have produced, it is also true that the average Capitalist does not know that he is doing any such thing, and that if once this crime can be 16 THE CASE FOR CAPITALISM brought home to him, and he can be not only convicted but convinced, he. will be quite ready to give up methods by which he has been preying on society.

The test of an economic system is its success in providing us with a good world to live in. ,, In what sort of a world would it be re~lly pleasant to live? To begin with, there would have to be plenty of good things and nice people. Up to a point, the good things come first, because we cannot live without them. But after our needs have been met in the matter of necessaries and comforts,. up to a very moderate extent, the necessity of pleasant people in order to lead a pleasant life among them becomes overwhelming. And people are pleasant to live with who are kindly, generous, honest, unselfish, healthy, keen and fully de veloped in mind and body. To get such people we evidently need a great increase in the output of nlaterial goods. It is, of cour~e, very easy to find many examples of pad temp.eredpeople who are well off, and of others who, leading lives of straitened penury, set an example of saintly behaviour. But it is a safe working rule that if the average human being can have a better supply of commodities and comforts, he is luore likely INTRODUCTORY to be pleasant to live with and to help us to get the world that we~re looking for than if he is living under conditions of scarcity and discomfort, and for real development we must have leisure and opportunity for education.

Moreover, we want· not only gObd things, but beautiful things. Beautiful things and beau tiful houses and beautiful cities require more time and better materials in their making than the shoddy goods, sordid houses and d\rty and insanitary towns which are so evil a blot on our so-called civilization. If we want a world in which every article we use is well and beau tifully made, every house that we live in is well and beautifully built, and every town in which we gather is as beautiful as Oxford or Canterbury, and more so-· because modern ugliness has put some foul blots upon these once beautiful centres-if we want all these things we must spare the time to make things well. We must not only be ready to maintain in comfort a large number of people who will give no thought to anything else but the pro duction of beauty in some line or other of industry, we must also light in everybody's mind the fire of desire for beallty.

In old' days a tyrant or a wealthy class or a church was able. to produce buildings and B 18 THE CASE FOR CAPITALISM works of art full of a beauty or a grandeur which still ~stonishes us, by means, of slave labour or by the devotion of members of a church who built, for example, the mediaeval cathedrals to the glory of God and for, the sheer pleasure of ,building 'H im' a noble. house. In these days, economic power is much more widely .spread and will be spread still more widely as wealth .is better distributed;, and we cannot expect to have a really beautiful country unless the greater number of the people know what beauty is and try to arrive at it. It is an open qU,estionwhether this desire for beauty is a thing that can be taught, but we may be quite sure that we are not likely to get it as long as most of us are concerned only with the narrow problems of making a living, and have'tio chanceofJulldevelopment of our minds and perceptions. I n other words, we want education and facilities for travel on a scale that we have not yet drean1t of. We want everybody with whom we come in con tact to be really well taught and really well informed, not necessarily in the way of schooling and book-learning. Many of the most inter~ esting people whom we come across are very deficient in both, but they have been able to have had wide and varied experience, to have INTRODUCTORY seen "many men and cities," and to have exchanged ideas with dwellers in many distant lands.

Here again it is easy to counter the argu ment with examples of honlely folk who, have never been ten miles from their native village and yet, owing to their powers of observation and sympathy, have, made' themselves masters ,or all that life means within a small compass. But these ex;amples of genius working under circumstances of great difficulty do not make it any the less true that it is good for the average human being to roam about the world and submit to the process by which men knock sparks out of one allother by personal impact For all this-education in a much wider sense than has yet· been attempted and ilnprovements I in human 'intercourse of \vhich we can hardly yet dream-..a great increase is needed in the output of good and services that ,mankind enJoys. Itwill not be enough, of course, unless those to whom these' advantages are given make the right use of them. Travel, as it is at present grant~d to ,a comparatively Slit all ' class, often seems to fail lamentably in widening their out look. The young English Philistine who·goes to Switzerland only for skiing and tobogganing, / 20 TH E CASE FOR CAPITALISM and regards the natural beauties of his own country chiefly from the point of view of their adaptability to the purposes of golf links, is not a good exalnple of mental development stimu-, lated by travel. All this has to be granted; but even those who, when travelling, confine themselves most carefully to the hotels and resorts in which they will meet no one but the most aggressively national spirits of their own nation, do get something from change of air and scene. Plenty of arguments can be brought forward against any attempt at trying to get at a better world in which everybody will be pleasanter and more sensible, but there is . no need to despair. In spite of all that has happened. in the last few years, there are most encouraging signs of an improve11)ent in the outlook of mankind upon its duties to itself: Little more than two hundred years ago a Te .[Jeum was sung in St. Paul's, specially cOInposed by Handel for the occasion, to cele brate the Peace of Utrecht which gave England a practical monopoly in the slave trade from West Africa to America. About a hundred years ago, at the eqd of a war which .had shaken and strained England almost as much as the one which we have just gone through, the Income Tax, on the declaration of peace, INTRODUCTORY 2T was immediately abolished, and the whole burden of a heavy debt-cha.rge was thrown on to indirect taxation of articles of consumption, which pressed most wickedly upon the poorer classes. Our ancestors who' committed this economic crime were at least as good, accord ing to their lights, as the statesmen of to-day, but they did not understand what they were doing. Probably there are many to-day who would like to repeat the proceeding now; but they could not even suggest it, because public opinion would not hear of it, quite apart from the fact that the widened suffrage would make it politically impossible. On all sides we see evidence of great improvement in what is thought about the manner in which one set of men· should be treated by another. Great strides have been n1ade under the Capitalistic era in the direction of n1aking the world a pleasanter place to live in, and though some of them have involved the development of new forms of suffering and disgrace, we can still maintain that the movement has been forward on the whole.

It need hardly be said that this progress . that we seek must not be confined to a small class. A really good world to live in implies, not only that we live there pleasantly among 22 THE CASE FOR CAPITALISM a .set of pleasant people, but .that there is no horrible suffering and destitution in the next street or anywhere else, which we have to forget. before we can be happy. Wealth in the sense of ordinary welfare and comfort must be not only abundant but well distributed before the world can be a pleasant place to live in for 1:hose who have any sympathy with human suffering. Thus we see· that material output, though it is very far from being the end of all things, is of very great p,ssistance in helping to produce the sort of world at which we want to arrive. A certain amount of it is essential to existence, and a great increase in it \-vill help very much, as human nature is at present, to make every body pleasant to live with in the truest sense of the word, to make the world and all the conditions .under which we live beautiful and noble, and to enable all to be educated in the truest and widest sense of the word. It follows, therefore,· that in .order to get. at the world that we want, an increase in .material output and a great improvement in. its diffusion among all classes, are essential. When we consider the economic system under which we live and alternatives to it which are suggested by its critics, the first question that we have to ask INTRODUCTORY 23 is. How far it.and these alternatives are likely to be efficient in. this matter of matJrial output.

We cannot get a really good world, full of good and noble. people, unless we can greatly increase man's power to produce.