VI. Ethics and Economics

If a man who cannot swim is pushed off the parapet of London Bridge he will drown without 66 Ethics and Economics any regard whatever to the ethical circumstances associated with the push that caused him to fall. It does not matter whether he was pushed over by his child in play, by his enemy with intent to murder, by the carelessness of a motor- 'bus driver, or fell over owing to excess of alcoholic liquor. Ethical problems galore arise from the circumstances that caused him to fall, but eternal study of these ethical problems will not prevent his drowning when once the physical act of falling has commenced. Or again, my knowledge of chemistry is limited to the fact that carbon dioxide has a way of turning lime-water milky, and lime-water will become milky under the influence of carbon dioxide whether the two things are brought together by a Communist ill Moscow, by a Pope in the Vatican or by Mr. Lloyd George and Lord Birkenhead in a coalition cabinet.

No more grotesque or distressing example of the danger of the confusion of ethical ideas and economic laws is, I think, to be found anywhere than in the message which the Archbishop of Yark, then Bishop of Manchester, addressed to the Copee Conference in Birmingham in 1924. The Bishop dealt with many matters, and amongst them the housing of the working classes. In this' connection he said: " There must be sacrifice of money in the most prosaic and therefore most testing form of increased rates and taxes. . readily voted and readily paid. Let no one think this unspiritual. It calls for little devotion of spirit to give generously when imagination is fired or feelings are touched; it takes 68 The Return to Laisser.Faire a· deeper dedication to lead' us gladly to vote for an increase of public expenditure' over which our personal control is slight and indirect. It is true that such expenditure is true economy; the money so spent is more than compensated by the human values secured. Where vital human needs are in question we must be ready for financial sacrifice.

,, We have seen afresh the meaning of Christ's Passion~. He reigns from the Tree." This passage/, typical in every way of much of the nonsense that well-meaning people talk in these times, ifclosel y studied and examined cannot fail to demonstrate the folly of the method. What are the facts? At the end of the nineteenth century this country was overbuilt. Many of the buildings were not of the sort that we should build to-day; many of them were inadequate to house the people who had advanced in education and in social habits far beyondtheir immediate predecessors, but there were more houses in the country than the people were willing or able to occupy. The population was slowly but surely moving out of old houses into newer ones, and from bad houses into better ones. The building trade had reached dimensions bigger than ever before or ever since, and we possessed the capacity and the facilities for building up to the maximum of our requirements. Building was one of our biggest industries; bricks and mortar were our favourite investment, and almost everybody entertained the ambition of saving a few pounds and owning a house.

~Then politicians came upon the scene, and the Ethics and Economics 69 notion developed that rates and taxes should be used for building, and the notion spread like wild fire~ Land legislation, building Acts and building schemes filled the air. In course of time a Ministry of Health was developed, and hundreds of millions of public money were spent upon building. In the twenty five years from 1900 to 1925 we spent more public money upon building houses for the working classes than was spent upon civil Government and all public purposes of every kind, except war, in the whole of the century from 1800 to 1900. Notice the results. By 1925 the personnel of the building trade, the bricklayers, the masons, the slaters, the plasterers, the carpenters and the rest of them, had dwindled to half the numbers of 1900. The price of houses had multiplied to three or four times the figure of a quarter of a century before.

The habit of investing in house property had been almost completely abolished. Nobody now puts a penny into bricks and mortar unless he is obliged to do so in order to find somewhere to live. Public debt had swollen to enormous figures, and our capacity to house ourselves had been reduced to one house per family per century. It is true that municipalities with much talk and much advertisement have, most of them, cleared some little area on their outskirts and erected a bunch of houses which, in the bulk and on the sur face, make it appear as if some building were being done. There can, however, be no dispute that the total of all such building amounts in fact to less 70 The Return to Laisser Faire than the total of the building that was done by other methods. So it is true to say that rates and taxes had· actually robbed us of half the houses we might have had, and yet so completely have we allowed ourselves to be deceived by mixing and muddling ethical considerations with economic laws, that the distinguished Archbishop is able at the end of this melancholy story, with a clear conscience and with public approbation, to claim the authority of the Master whom he serves for "increased rates and taxes" to cause us still further deprivation of houses. ' I admit, of course, that my view of the economic side of the housing problem is a matter of opinion.

I am not so foolish as to suppose that because I believe in private enterprise in building it is im possible that some day, in some society, some other system may produce houses; but houses are not made of sermons, they consist of bricks and mortar. They do not materialise from philosophy; they are strictly material things. 'When a bricklayer lays one brick upon another he provides a small piece of material wealth which will bring comfort and health and happiness to other people, if. the brick is well laid, for perhaps a century. Nothing can alter this simple fact, and, as a matter of economics, any consideration -of the bricklayer's motive or of the aspirations and ideas which actuated and caused him to lay one brick upon another, is totally irrelevant and immaterial. It does hot concern the brick and the need for it and the use of it, whether the bricklayer does it in Ethics and Economics 71 order to buy a new frock for his baby or in order to buy prussic acid to murder his wife. Th~ only thing that matters on the economic side of the problem is tqat the brick should be well and truly laid in its proper and.appropriate place.

Socialists-and eve~ Blatchford must take his share of blame in this respect-try to make the best of both worlds' and try to have it both ways in this matter of the ethical and material. They wax elo quent against riches. There is, of course, a very strong ethical case against the misuse of riches. It is very important that we should each of us be taught how to use such riches as we secure, and to entertain the right ideas in our endeavour to secure riches. But Socialists do not scruple, when it suits them, to rail against riches as bad in themselves. Blatchford is more honest than most of them, and far, more logical. He preaches the simple life. He objects to the possessions of the rich, and he offers little more than the merest necessities of life to the citizens of his Merrie England. But the appeal of the Socialist case to. the people as a whole is an appeal to their very natural desire to possess riches themselves. The main plank in' the pro gramme of the Socialist party, and to a dangerous extent of every other political party, consists in the offer to transfer riches from one class to another.

The aspirant for political hondurs, certainly if he is a Socialist, says in fact: "If you object to riches, vote for me, and I will abolish them; if, on the other hand, you want riches, also vote for me, and I will give them to you."

72 The .Return to Laisser Faire It is perhaps too much to hope for perfect logic in public affairs, but 'the total absence of anything approaching logic in this very common attitude does no credit to us as a people. There is altogether too much easy acquiescence in the spurious notion of an ethical side to Socialism. Socialism, indeed, in some quarters, as is illustrated by the attitude of the Bishop of Manchester, is credited with being a sort of religion. I do not doubt that there are many thousands of Socialist dupes who are genuinely under the impression that the political faith of their adoption has an ethical or religious side to it, but surely if ethics and economics are to be connected at all, a much more inspiring religion can be built upon Capitalism than ever came out of the degradation of the Socialist idea. Socialism, if it is associated with anything at all in the public mind, is linked up with the notion of an easy life, whereas religion and ease have little in common. Apart altogether from the economic truth that life is not, and never can be, easy, there are surely some deeper, truer, more ennobling in spirations to be found in the endeavour, the service, the work, the triumph over difficulties which are inseparable from the struggle for existence so un fortunately termed Capitalism.

The common confusion of ideas in material and in ethical matters leads to all sorts of misconcep tions which drag us down. Every ill to which man is heir is eommonly attributed, not only by the Socialists, but by many other well-meaning people, Ethics and Economics 73 to economic causes. Whatever we suffer from lack of education, and the suffering in this respect is surely immense, is quite incapable o-f remedy through the medium of rates and taxes. We can, with advantage, spend rates and taxes on the right sort of education, but we cannot make rates and taxes take the place of the personal and individual effort that is necessary to grow potatoes or to build houses. If education fails to prepare us for the strenuous personal and individual effort which alone can provide for us and for society, then there is something wrong with education. This muddle over the ethical and the material would cease to worry us if we could get a··new conception of the service which is rendered to each and all by the individual effort of each of us.

We are too fond of deciding what is the duty of the other fellow. Political schemes are almost entirely concerned with the duty of the other fellow. I t is so obvious to the politically minded that all the others are wrong and must be put right. We vote to "lnake the foreigner pay" or to tax· somebody else, but never to impose obligations or restrictions upon ourselves. But the man who knows what the other fellow should do is often a very useless and inefficient person himself. The gift of the gab is rarely given to those who are proficient in more practical and homely things. I recommend in this connection a very simple and illuminating experi ment which any reader can make. Ask a business man and a Socialist to tea for, say, Thursday week. Nineteen times out of twenty the business man will 74 The Return to Laisser Faire pull out his diary, -will tell you either that he can not come to tea, or that he will catch the 4.20', and that, much as he regrets it, he must leave by the 5.45, because he has an appointment at 6.30 which he must keep.

The Socialist, on the other hand, the gentleman who knows everything about everything, whose mind is so soaked in spurious ethics that he has no doubt as to the duty of everybody else, will thank you for your invitation and tell you that he will1et you know to-morrow. If he does relli'ember to ring you up, which is very unlikely, he will explain that he would like to come to tea next Thursday week, although he is not sure whether he promised to sit on some committee which he thinks will meet on Wednesday and may adjourn to Thursday, but will you, he asks, give him a ring in the morning, when perhaps he will be able to let you know. Finally, when the tea party is ready, he will ring you up to say how sorry he is to have caused you any inconvenience, and "do you really want me to come to tea, 'or would it not be better if you met me at some conference the week after next, but in any case don't wait for me," and he win perhaps come as soon as he can. If he is a politician, as, of course, most Socialists are, these negotiations will be complicated by the introduction of secretaries; two or three people, as well as yourself and your domestic staff, will be kept busily occupied doing nothing, except exhausting their mental and nervous reserves.

Justice is hard to find. There is very little of it Ethics and Economics 75 in human affairs, but surely no injustice was ever so complete or so devastating as that which has asso ciated Socialism with morality and Capitalism with the immoral. What could be more immoral, more disastrous, more'devilish in all its implications and results than the limitation of human effort which is inseparable from Socialism? What, indeed, can be more degrading than the notions of control which are the bedrock· of Socialism? Capitalism, which consists in the serving of the desires of others, has been perverted by false argument, and Socialism, which consists in subjugating and controlling the desires of others, has been twisted into a worthy ideal. We must get back to Blatchford, and we must separate· the things which are needful for the body from those which are needful for the mind. These needs will react upon one another. Socialism could well b~come a sort of fanatical religion, which argues that comfort and wealth and material well being are bad for the soul, and must, therefore, be abolished. On those lines Socialism might well claim to have some relation to ethics, but Socialism or political action of any description can seldom be anything but a destroyer of material well-being.

Nothing has stood in the way of our industrial development and the advance of our material well being except our mania for politics-our collective obsession, our determination to discuss and to regulate every action before we undertake it. We should, by all the rules of progress, be infinitely better off than any Continental nation. Neverthe76 The Return to Laisser Faire less, New York, quite justly and properly, looks upon us as part of hopeless Europe, and Mr. Lloyd George earns a living by writing about us for American newspapers as if we were Poles or Bes sarabians. England found out how to make wealth-not money, but things-years before America started. Fifty years ago the standard of life here, with all its faults and failings, was higher, much higher, than had. ever been known in human experience in any age or in any country. Then we became addicted to politics, and since that time have been engaged in throwing away our her~tage. From an economic point of view politics are far more destruc tive than war.

Our triumphs of the Victorian era-that period in which we lifted our own people and other peoples of the world out of the slough of their medireval despond to a civilised state-were achieved before education became a shibboleth. England founded trade and commerce and provided the basis of modern civilisation with a people who, for the most part,were illiterate. How much better could we do to-day after thirty or forty years of education? Our education is being chiefly used in the manu facture of new political sophistries. When our people reach the stage at which they are able to visualise the needs of a nation of 43,000,000 people, then-and not till then-shall we get a new spirit, C\ new idea and new enthusiasms. We shall have re vealed to our newly-opened eyes the complete and utt~r folly of most of the things we are doing to-day.

Ethics and Economics 77 We shall see how, by political means, we are rob bing ourselves of the very things that are offered to us by the politicians. The problem can be stated in plain, unvarnished terms in a few sentences. We are suffering from a surplus of labour and a shortage of wealth. In these circumstances we all of us devote the major part of our energies to the quest for new ways of limiting, restricting, regulating, and restraining the individual actions of man and the production of wealth, with the natural result that the surplus of labour gets greater and the shortage of wealth gets more acute. If we reverse our policy, dismiss politics from our minds, and all of us dedicate our selves to activity and the production of wealth, we could arrive, and arrive very quickly, at a condition of affairs in which there was a shortage of labour and a surplus of wealth. The economic condition of the world could be changed completely were we but willing to understand that it is the absence of things which produces poverty. So long as we insist upon making the production of things more and more difficult it is not only useless but stupid to complain of poverty.