IV. Production versus Poverty

There is plenty of evidence to show that a very limited number of aristocrats and a comparatively limited number of middle-class people lived in fair comfort. They never bathed, managed without soap, and their behaviour was like that of savages in comparison with most of our modern habits. But they were able to enjoy life. I have, however, been quite unable to discover (and I have searched long and earnestly) where and how nine-tenths of the British citizens of this time lived. My own belief is that the conditions which now prevail in places like the South of Ireland and the interior of Brittany were common here, and that our ancestors dragged out an existence in turf hovels or mud huts-and other habitations to match-and that most of them were far nearer in their material condition to Adam than they were to us. It is beyond dispute that three-fourths of all the 46 The Return to Laisser Fai1'e houses that now stand in this country have been built since 1850. It is equally beyond dispute that the vast majority of all the dwellings in which we now find shelter were built in the last few years of last century, when private enterprise and speculation were encouraged in the building trade.

What did our ancestors of a hundred years ago wear ? Were there such things. as underclothes as we know them? Or is it a fact that a garment, once laboriously made by hand, was. passed from father to child until, when it failed to hang together, bits of it were patched into some other garment for the next generation. We know that in 1850 the total consumption of wool inthe United Kingdom was 181b. per head of the population per annum. We know that 500,000 bales of cotton had to do the work now done by 3,500,000 bales. And all the available statistics show that 100 years ago the material resources of mankind were a mere fraction of those at our service to-day. What did our ancestors eat? A hundred years ago the consumption of sugar amounted to 30Z. per week per head. To-day every man, woman and child among us consumes in some form or another 31b. of sugar every week of his or her life. Meat as a regular element in diet was almost un known, until Individualism produced the Industrial Revolution and the abolition of poverty thus became for the first time a practical proposition.

Or tackle the same problem the other way round, Production versus Poverty 47 and look at our standards to-day to see how they fit the past. The enormous disparity is clearly seen if we jot down the doings of the normal modern man in a normal day and consider their relation to the industrial developments of the last century or two. A bank clerk may be regarded as a good average, specimen of the majority of us as we live in the year 1928. His life may be taken as typical of the life of most people who work for a living. Here is an abbreviated sketch of a day in the life of such an individual. On waking he finds his head on a feather pillow. He is covered with a cotton sheet spread over a wool or hair mattress, supported by springs. He steps out of bed on to a piece of carpet, looks at his watch, takes a cup of hot water or hot tea, which was pre pared with the heat from a gas stove. He washes himself with soap and a sponge, brushes his teeth, puts his clothes on in a matter of five minutes, thanks to bone and metal buttons, and goes down to breakfast.

He drinks coffee, tea, cocoa, as he fancies, sweetened with sugar, swallows a mouthful of mar malade, dropping some of it on the tablecloth. He puts on a mackintosh, and, armed with an umbrella in one hand and gloves in the other, sets out for the City. On the way he buys a newspaper, tobacco and matches. He makes the journey in a train, tram, or omnibus, on a road paved and drained, and then he begins to do a day's work that in almost every detail was not thought of 200 years ago.

48 The Return to Laisser Faire . On returning home at night he has a currant bUll or a piece of chocolate cake with his tea, and a supper of frozen meat, after which he sits on a little grass lawn, or perhaps tends his roses. He will then change his boots and read a novel or playa game of bridge. Before retiring for the night he will, per haps, write a letter to a friend to arrange a cycle 'ride for the following Sunday, and then proceed to take off his clothes and get into a nightshirt or pyjamas. He will open his bedroom window, turn off the gas or electric light and try to forget every thing till the following morning. A careful study of this simple story will disclose the fact that there is scarcely a thought or action or thing in the whole of it that would have passed through the mind or been done or existed 2,00 years ago. To begin with, of course, bank clerks, in any numbers, were not wanted 200 years ago. .Trade has not only produced the bank clerk himself, but it has produced everything that he does and touches, and all that goes to make up life for him, from which it follows that without trade life itself would be impossible.

This is not the place to enter upon a dissertation concerning the highly technical 'question of popula tion, but it may be noted in passing that while popu lation remained more or less stationary for thousands of years, it only began to grow when modern trade began to function, so that we may say, as we read· or write these lines, that we might not have been here to do either were it not for trade.

Production versus Poverty 49 All the little comforts and conveniences, such as they are, which help to make the life of the bank clerk tolerable, might by now have been equally available to every working man and woman. In deed all might have had much more. We know from the experience of America how rapidly wealth is spread where trade is left free to function. See ing indeed that we had a good long start of America, wealth should be more general here than there. But as we have allowed the politicians and the Collectivists to impose their theories upon our business classes and to squander our wealth on arti ficial restraints and hindrances, most of us are still comparatively poor. And now we can get straight down to our arith metic. Suppose we set the problem like this: Let us give to some railway porter of our acquaintance another £ 5 a week. Let us make an arrangement whereby this worthy fellow, with his life mapped out on a basis of 455., is assured of an income of £ 7 55.. What would he do? What changes would he make? What exactly would happen? I think there are probably nine simple things, among a great many others, that would happen right away.

I. He would move into a better house, with a bath room. 2. He would get himself another suit of clothes. 3. He would buy himself another pair of boots, so that he could change from day to day and give the wet ones a chance to dry before he put them on again. 4. He would buy a new hat for himself, and if his wife were a frugal woman, a couple of hats for her. 5. He would double his consumption of coal, and enjoy a 4 50 The Return to Laisser Faire fire when he now frequently goes without, and he would bring his coal account up to, say, two tons\a year for each member of his family. 6. For the first time in his life he would give himself the luxury of an umbrella. 7. He might buy a mackintosh. 8. If he had a daughter he would probably acquire a piano on the hire-purchase plan. 9. He would take a definite step up in society by treating himself to the luxury of a clean collar a day. These are homely, simple things that don't find a place in political speeches. It is easy to perorate about £ I a week but not so easy to make speeches about umbrellas or hats.

I have taken the case of a railway porter, and re garded him as if he were a solitary individual with an additional £ 5 a week. But it is quite impossible to found any public policy, or any political pro gramme or any scheme of social reform upon the circumstances of one individual, or even upon those of a single class of individuals. National wealth is concerned with the wealth of us all. If we now give to our hypothesis a wider, more sensible basis, and picture what would happen if £ 5 a week were added to the wealth, or to the power of material enjoyment of all of us, we begin to see the real nature of the difficulties so freely discussed to-day and so little understood. Let us suppose, for the sake of this argument, that the adult male portion of the nation is composed of railway porters whose income it is proposed to -increase by £ 5 a week each. Our supposition gives rise to an easy problem Production versus Poverty 51 in arithmetic-43,000,ooo people divided into 10,000,000 families, the head of each family, like our railway porter, to have £ 5 per week added to his income. We will assume, again only for the sake of simplicity, that each of them will use the /; 5 a week in the way that we have suggested the money would be employed by the single railway porter whom we took as our original example. Dealing with the points in the order in which we placed them before: I. Xhe first thing we require is 10,000,000 decent houses. There exist at the moment certainly not more than 2,000,000 houses which would satisfy railway porters having ap income of £ 7 5s. a week, so that on the instant we need 8,000,000 homes, or, stated in different terms, as many as the united efforts of the Government and the municipalities and private owners could build at the present rate in the next forty years. No amount of money will achieve this object. The trouble arises from the absence of bricks and timber, and all the material things that go to make up a house, and, chiefly, from the absence of the most important of all-indi vidual effort. It is a sad reflection when we remem ber that thirty years ago private enterprise and com petition had discovered the way to fill this need and was just about to accomplish the task, when political interference stopped all building progress and halved the personnel of the building industries.

The 200,000 houses a year from which the Minis try of Health and all its satellites derive such satis faction are barely sufficient to replace worn-out 52 The Return to Laisser Faire houses. If 10,000,000 homes is the proper figure for our population, and if we give to every home a life of fifty years, it will be seen that 200,000 houses a year are necessary to replace' those that wear out. A very small proportion of all the houses built can hope to survive the slum test fifty years after their erection. We further gave to our railway porter a house with a bathroom, which means in our bigger sum that we should have in this country to-day 10,000,000 baths, with an equal number of hot-water systems, and of all the paraphernalia that go to make up a normal bathroom. 2. We next imagine that our railway porter would get himself another suit of clothes. If we allow-ffnd it is surely not unreasonable-that a man with £ 7 5S. a week would expect to have him self, and to give to his wife and to his children three suits or dresses per annum, then the market for clothes in this country alone is represented by 135,000,000 outfits a year-a qu,antity well beyond the most optimistic dreams of the most enterprising Selfridge.

3. To provide each of us with two pairs of boots a year, which was suggested as a third item in the railway porter's programme, will increase the home demand on the boot market to 9°,000,000 pairs. 4. If, like the railway porter, each of the men had a hat a year, while each w·oman had three, we get an immediate demand for more than 60,000,000 hats-a figure, I presume, that has never been approached by any hat trade outside America.

Production versus Poverty 53 5. If every working-class family were able, as is here suggested, to double its consumption of coal, the grave problems of that industry would quickly disappear. 6. A simple little item like an umbrella, if we give to it a life of a couple of years and restrict its use to the adult population, means a trade of 15,000,000 umbrellas per annum. 7. Similarly, with mackintoshes. Supposing we argue that a child does not want a mackintosh until it reaches school age, and that here again we give to the average mackintosh a life of two years, we find that our requirements amount to about 20,000,000 mackintoshes a year. 8. There are, so far as I can ascertain, about 1,000,000 pianos in our homes at the present time. To put our railway porter right we require, there fore, at once, 9,000,000 more. 9. If it were possible, as we have suggested, for every man in the country to have a clean collar every day of his life, the laundry trade would be called upon to handle more than 5,000,000,000 collars a year. The soap trade, with all its wonderful capacity, would be inadequate to the demand.

Furthermore, if we allow to each man no more than one dozen new collars a year-a meagre allow ance unless laundry science is greatly improved we find that our requirements are no less than 180,000,000 collars, with all that that means to the cotton and linen industries. If I am right in thinking that most of the votes given to the Socialists are given by people who have S4 The Return to Laisser Faire visions of an additional £ S a week, then do we re vert to this list of things that are wanted, and, mark, wanted now: 8,000,000 houses~ 135,000,000 clothing outfits. 90,000,000 pairs of boots. 60,000,000 hats. 15,000,000 umbrellas. 20,000,000 mackintoshes. 9,000,000 pianos. 180,000,000 collars. All these things and much besides would quickly appear on a free market in which we were all at liberty to exercise our capabilities to the full. There is however no hope of any such development of wealth so long as we are afflicted with all our present Collectivist restraints on individual activity.

The job is too big to organise, but split up into forty million little jobs is easily within our compass. But these facts emphasise the truth of the theory that the problem of poverty is nota problem of money, but of things, and that if we will make the things the problem disappears. Things are made by individuals. How suicidal then are all the multi farious restrictions with which we hedge ourselves around. Most of the difficulties in the economic world would rapidly be solved if people could be brought to accept and act upon the indubitably true proposi tion that every piece of work or trade completed leads directly and immediately to another piece of work or trade.

Production versus Poverty 55 Production comes before consumption and leads to it. The presence of a supply creates a demand. There is only one exception of which I am aware to this unalterable rule. No increase in the produc tion of coffins is likely, so far as I can see, to im prove the demand upon the coffin trade, but with that single exception I know of no other com modity which would not be more freely consumed if production were increased or accelerated, and thus cheapened.