The Road To Freedom,
And What Lies Beyond
CHAPTER 12
Josiah and Ethel Wedgwood
[Published in London by C.W. Daniel, Ltd., 1913]
WHAT IT WOULD MEAN
… What do each of us stand to lose,
when the Leveller comes upon us, like Death, with his scythe?
… Many of us will lose a great
deal: perhaps some of the things that seem to us -- and not in a base
way -- very important; because the upper classes have not only got
wealth and comfort through this general system of exploitation, but
also excellences of mind and body that they are not wrong in prizing
highly. We must be prepared to forfeit everything -- good as well as
bad -- that has been got in an unjust way, and therefore this
movement, once understood, would be very much hated by most of the
upper and middle classes, and only come because it was inevitable. For
the person who goes into the true revolution is like the passenger
over Acheron -- he can take nothing but his naked soul with him, and
must trust to finding something better than his lost possessions on
the other side.
… The "Lower Orders".
… The obvious gainers by the change
to a system of freedom and equal opportunity will, of course, be the "Lower
Orders," who will benefit immediately, for the most part, in
every conceivable way. The great mass of genuine workers are fitted at
once to make use of the new opportunities. The wastrels, the foolish,
the parasites and the blackguards of that class will suffer some
inconvenience until they disappear, for they will be deprived of the
conditions necessary for their existence and propagation. There will
be no rich for them to attack or to toady; no prospects of wealth to
tempt them on to crime or parasitism, and no destitution to goad them
to it; no general sense of injustice and ill-treatment to make public
opinion condone their unsocial actions.
… The "Middle Classes":
… The bourgeois or middle class
will suffer a good deal. They will suffer not only in their pockets,
but in their amour-propre and in their religion. The necessities of
their existence have at all times taught them a special creed, which
is inseparable from their best peculiarities. They worship, as barely
second to the Deity, punctuality, sobriety, thrift, industry, early
rising and cleanliness -- in short, all those good qualities which
take prizes in the business world. Any erraticness or irregularity, as
it means business ruin, is a menace to their caste, and is ranked by
them with essential immorality; and they invariably oppose with
righteous indignation anything that may upset the social ladder up
which they are climbing with such diligence, courage and
self-restraint.
… It is in spite of the opposition
of this class that the revolution will be carried.
… The "Upper Classes"
… The wealthy will, of course, be
the greatest losers in the way of material possessions, and they will
no doubt fight the change so soon as they begin to see it coming. At
present, they are on a pinnacle, and trust to the extent of their
money and power to keep themselves above the high -water mark of the
deluge.
… Those of them who are self-made
men, of no tradition and small education, are the least to be pitied,
for their loss at most will be purely material, whilst many of them
could rely on their brains and business capacity to keep them afloat
under any fair conditions.
… Then there is the large class of
hereditary gentlefolk, who have their traditional prestige to lose,
and, in addition, perhaps, direct privileges as landowners.
… Except for the damage to their
prejudices, this class would not suffer as acutely as many others from
the change to free industrial conditions and social equality. Most of
them have been brought up to an active -- if non-productive -- way of
life; they are by training and custom plucky, practical, fairly
healthy and hardy, and socially genial. Such men, even if they lost at
one stroke all they possessed, would be far better suited to keep
themselves by their labour than the usual "unemployed" of
the lower orders. They are just the type to take the lead in home or
foreign colonisation, and to keep from their personal qualities much
of their present ascendancy. For these country gentlemen, the change
from existing circumstances to those of a free society would be
actually less than for any other class - except perhaps the artisan or
the intelligent country labourer.
… The Aristocratic and the
Intellectual Classes.
… Those who are most to be
sympathised with in such a prospect are the intellectual class --
those who have some claim to consider themselves as the real
aristocracy of the nation -- the better professional classes, the
writers, historians, rich amateurs, painters, professors, etc.
… A very earnest writer, in two
books lately published,[1] has urged the rich and the aristocratic to
reform themselves: the rich to make a less bad use of their money, to
be less self-indulgent, sensuous and selfish; the aristocracy to
educate themselves better, and become leaders by virtue, not by
tradition.
… But the problem goes deeper than
that. It is not a question of making better use of riches and leisure
and culture, but of whether their acquisition is compatible with
justice and common morality. The culture and education of the
intellectual world is derived as much from the spoliation of the lower
world as are material riches. No consecrating of the things so gotten
to the service of humanity will satisfy reason and conscience, any
more than the takings of robbery offered at a shrine.
… The cultured man thinks:
"These poor, ignorant people do for me the rough
work to which I am superior. In return I devote my knowledge and
talents to their guidance and enlightenment."
But the poor and ignorant reply in their hearts:
"If it were not that you live by our rough work, we
should have no need of your guidance. Change places awhile; take to
yourself the toil, and give us the enlightenment."
The educated class are under the impression that the value of their
existence pays the community for the privileged position they occupy.
But what is really the case? Many of these people have independent
incomes -- that is to say, they can live on other people's work
without working themselves.
… Some of them take to literature
and art: they create a little world which exists by writing books or
painting pictures or composing music, and by reading, looking at,
listening to, and writing criticisms of what the others write, paint
and compose. This they call "higher culture," and imagine
that it is all of benefit to the world at large - because rich
connoisseurs will pay to dabble in such things ; or because they
exhibit sometimes in the East End for charity. And because they enjoy
having beautiful thoughts and fine ideas, they imagine that their
possessing them is an equivalent for the lives of the crass, inferior
people, who work at tedious work many hours a day, feeding, clothing
and housing the educated people with the fine thoughts.
… Then there is the class of
professional artists, who really live by catering for the public
demands in art, literature, drama, etc. In so far as these people live
by providing entertainments for a society that is spoilt by wealth at
the top and poverty at the bottom, it is impossible to say how far
they are parasitic. Only a free society can test the value of their
services and determine whether they will continue their trade, or
return amongst the manual workers. Then there are the professional men
and women -- making incomes by services to the community that are of
dubious value, or of value only in existing conditions: -- lawyers,
who prosper on money disputes; doctors, who live by the diseases of
civilisation; the civil servant, who is the protege of the State; of
these too, the functions and numbers may be expected to diminish.
… There is also the class of
philanthropists, which has recently become in itself a profession.
These people are genuinely grieved at the ills of society, and lead
laborious lives trying to remedy them, working as hard as any
wage-earner at hospital committees, boards of guardians, district
visiting, school managing, etc., etc., in a perpetual effort to undo
some of the evils of which they and those like them are in part the
cause. If there is any truth in the preceding pages, then these people
too will find their occupation gone in the new world of freedom, and
drop from the guardian angels to the fellows of their neighbours.
… Good brains and education will
keep their natural predominance in every society and through any
revolution, but much of the extant intellectualism is a spurious
culture, grown for and existing only in a hot-house atmosphere.
… The intellectuals emphasise the
necessity of brain workers who are exempted from all manual exertions,
as necessary for the good guidance and ordering of the manual workers.
They will not see that their sharpened and trained brains have been
fed by the overwork and the brutalising of those classes of whom they
imagine themselves the saviours; that because they refuse their share
in the common lot of Adam, others must toil and sweat double; and that
in order that they may be finer instruments, others must be greater
brutes. They are, in fact, themselves helping to create the problem to
whose solution they devote the midnight oil, the pens, ink and paper
that others have made.
… But if, under free conditions,
there were fewer specially trained intellects, there would be probably
a higher average of culture, and certainly the opportunities for
special natural intelligence would be more equal. At present the field
from which the clever people are drawn is very narrow. The highest
mental qualities have little chance, unless they go with an
independent income; for it is minds of second-rate order which survive
and succeed in the competitive business world.
… And this brings us to the other
kind of "intellectuals" -- to the real thing -- the race,
not of trained clever people, but of those who have that special
quality which makes us recognise them as great men. Such men are
beacons to their own generation, and landmarks to those who come
after, and the world owes its best things to them. Are they, too, to
be swept away with the rest of the intellectual class, in this
holocaust to liberty and equality? Now, such men have come to us from
all grades of society: they are not confined to the leisured and
sheltered class. They have come, like Plato, from a small oligarchy,
like Christ from the working class of a despised race, or like Tolstoy
from the rich and highly educated. But if they could be brought to
birth and reared only under a system of privilege, and nourished only
by the compulsory labour of their inferiors, then the best men -- one
may believe -- would say of themselves, that they too must go, and
that the light which shone in them will find some other medium more
compatible with common human rights.
… But if it is the intellectuals as
a class who will suffer most in a true revolution, they are the
principal danger to it, unless they surrender their privileges
voluntarily; for their very education gives them power to turn the
masses aside into wrong roads after false aims. There is no danger to
the revolution in the rich or the well-born, once it is afoot. They
will fight for their position, but it will be a mere contest of force,
in which -- being the smallest party, and also least sure of a good
cause -- they will be worsted.
… The danger lies in the
intellectuals, who are already trying to turn the revolution in a
direction which shall make them pilots of the popular movement, and
leave the common people in helpless dependence on their guidance. In
renouncing this privileged position they would have to sacrifice what
is far more to them than material comfort or success. They would have
to forgo the very ideals for which they have neglected such common
things, to forgo their fine visions -- schemes of human existence,
their image of an evolution, in which history unrolls itself like a
magnificent and harmonious pageant, and in the perfecting of which
their own lives were to play a part. They would have to acquiesce in
the decay of what they appreciate as noble social architecture -- the
edifices of time and great intellects - in the neglect of the refined
and beautiful, and in the triumph of vulgarity. They must accept a
future human landscape in which there are no picturesque incidents,
and few exalted passions - only the simple inglorious passion for
unadorned truth and humdrum justice. To some minds it would be no
small abrogation to lay their beautiful dreams aside, and accept the
commonplace. And a world in which men are both just and free, without
strife or wealth or poverty, would be likely to be very prosaic and
insipid to our palate. We may regret the crimson in the picture, the
sharp contrasts, the splendour and the din of battle ; and perhaps the
beauty of the new social life may be impossible to appreciate except
by other men in another age. Yet what can we do but let these things,
too, go, if need be?
NOTES
- A. Ponsonby, "The Camel
and the Needle's Eye" and "The Decline of the
Aristocracy."
CONTENTS
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