III. Merrie England

Thus we see why, at the moment, we are over done with Socialism. We are some millions short of men of 30. The war did that for us. Another ten years will put the matter right, but for the moment we are paying what is, perhaps, the heaviest 34 M errie Eng land 35 item in the war. bill, suffering from the lack of a generation of manhood which could and would, were it here, make England a much better place. The gospel of Individualism has been forgotten ex cept by the few. There is, however, as always happens in human affairs, a certain amount of compensation or balance, and Socialism itself is wearing out. No story, how ever silly, will last for ever, and for years and years nothing has been added to or altered in the silly Socialist story. It was told as it had never been told before, and is never likely to be told again, by Robert Blatchford in 1894, when he published that jolly book appropriately called "Merrie Eng land." A study of Blatchford's exposition of Socialism brings out very clearly the fact that not a syllable, not a thought, not a notion worth the name has been added to Socialism since Blatchford wrote.

He said it all thirty-four years ago, and, as one would expect from so charming a fellow as Nunquam of the Clarion, he has by this time almost given it up. But" Merrie England" remains the best of all the Socialist writings. It is, as I have said, a jolly book; it bubbles with a sense of humour; it is enlivened with funny little drawings of Capitalistic monkeys, and it sends you to bed after an evening's reading without a headache and with a sense of satisf action. I turn to Blatchford for relief after my daily study of the stodgy nonsense so continuously poured out as the current literature of Socialism. Its authors 36 The Return to Laisser Faire are all so dolefully serious, so ignorantly earnest, and so conceitedly cocksure. Blatchford, the reader may remember, adopts the Ruskin trick, but instead of addressing a work ing Inan, directs his remarks to Mr. Jahn Smith, " a staunch Liberal" and" a shrewd, hard-headed, practical man," whom he appropriately locates at Oldham. "How," asks Blatchford, "are we to make the best of our country and of our lives? " I like the introduction of " our country," a note which modern Socialists have lost. "What things," he goes on, "do we need in order to secure a happy, healthy, and worthy human life? We may divide the things needful into two kinds-· mental and physical. That is to say, the things needful for the body and the things needful for the mind."

" The bodily needs are two-· health and susten ance. The mental needs are three-knowledge, pleasure and intercourse." "As to sustenance, there are four chief things needed to sustain life in a civilised community-food, clothing, shelter, and fuel" : and from this simple and entirely human and practical starting-point Blatchford runs off his delightful story of the Socialist State. We need not bother with the story in detail. To begin with, he takes us back to the land and feeds us from the produce of our own little island, which is enough to show that" Merrie England" must be classified as fiction and is devoid of serious economics. The book is crammed full of the bad arithmetic and bad logic which are the common cur rency of Socialism. That one would expect, but it M effie England 37 is not often, even in far worse Socialist writings, that one finds such complete self -exposure as Blatchford gives us.

His enthusiasm for the cause which he was then preaching led him into the unfortunate indiscretion of printing in two lines cheek by jowl the two fol lowing sentences. He is speaking of the workers, and he tells us that "they would receive all the produce of their labour." The very next sentence reads, " Pensions would be granted to the ancient poor." It never occurs to Blatchford that if every one receives all the produce of his labour, there is no produce left wherewith to pay pensions or any other public or social service. Some Socialists overcome this sort of difficulty by a boastful denial of logic as if it were an antiquated and unnecessary capitalistic device. Blatchford is genuinely and happily ignorant of anything so horridly practical. But even this sort of thing does not spoil one's affec tion for Robert Blatchford. He was the perfectly charming young man Socialist of thirty years ago, and it is just as well that the young man, whether Socialist or not, should be free from the restraint which comes with middle age and experi ence.

When he wrote" Merrie England," however, Blatchford was getting very near to the age of dis cretion, while still retaining some of his youthful nazvete. "These are my ideas," he says. "They are very crude, and, of course, very imperfect. But don't trouble on that score. When your public understands Socialism and desires to establish it 38 The Return to Laisser Faire there will be no difficulty about plans. Just get a number of your cleverest organisers and adminis trators into committee and let them formulate a scheme." Seeing that in the meantime we have had Dr. Addison and committees by the million, I think I am justified in claiming that Socialism is worn out. But Blatchford appeals to me in quite another way. He talks of " Merrie England," and he tacks on his Socialism to a lovable form of Nationalism which is quite irresistible. Listen to this: " Now, then, what is the problem? I call it the problem of life. We have here a country and a people. The problem is-given a country and a people, find how the· people may make the best of the country and of themselves. First, then, as to the capacities of the country and the people. The country is fertile and fruitful, a1)d well stored with nearly all the things that people need. The people are intelligent, industrious, strong and famous for their perseverance, their inventiveness and re source. It looks, then, as if such a people in such a country must certainly succeed in securing health and happiness and plenty for all."

Since the war it has been fashionable to talk of world problems, and every little parish councillor thinks, and thinks justly, that he has some share of responsibility for putting the world right. I pro pose to tackle the world through the individuals of whom it is composed, and not, as too many of the parish councillors would have us do, through world wide arrangements in which scarcely anyone beMerrie England 39 lieves and which would never work to whatever ex tent belief were imposed in them. Building a perfect world is not unlike any other building job, and must start with the foundations. However perfect a roof is constructed at Geneva or elsewhere it will tumble to pieces unless it rests upon a decent, honest, clean and healthy individual down below. I can, therefore, claim to be concerned with the well-being of the world while disclaiming any interest in the modern habit of world arrangements.

My way and the politicians' way have nominally the same aim in "iew, but my way will get there. I would not therefore talk about the world, but about England. We can tackle England and we can make it abetter place. That isa comparatively simple little job which is within our own powers and capC!bilities, but if we were to succeed in making England a perfect place we could not fail to make the world a better place, for the world would copy England. It has always done so. I have no sympathy with patriotism or nationalism of the Jingo kind, but patriotism is like that economic entity competition, and is capable of much misunderstanding. There is good patriotism and there is bad patriotism, just as there is good com petition and bad competition. Either of these things, if founded upon a desire to be better oneself, is thoroughly good, healthy and desirable. Either of them, if founded upon a mere desire to beat the other fellow, is bad, unhealthy and undesirable.

Build up the argument in this way. If we had a perfect world it would include a perfect England.

40 The Return to Laisser Faire A perfect Englan~ involves a perfect you and me, and I therefore propose, as Blatchford would say, that you and I, Mr. Smith, take a rest now and again from going to Westminster to put each other right, and that we spend a little time at home in the en deavour each to get himself right. If that endeavour succeeded, then we should be a good deal nearer to a right England, if indeed we did not find that the task was -accomplished. And a right England would be a good big step towards a right world. It is not necessary to be a Jingo or t6 be conceited to believe that England, this tiny little island, Merrie England as it might be called, has in point of fact given to the world everything that it pos sesses except art, music and philosophy. Nobody will deny that England has set a standard for the world in the matter of government. Eng land produced the mother of all Parliaments, Eng land has developed the democratic system, and in these respects England has a responsibility to the world as a whole. If, having discovered and per fected these undoubted blessings, we now abuse them, on our heads will rest the blame if the rest of the world also makes havoc of democracy and government. If by insisting that the democratic principle shall build houses and dig coal we fail, as, of course, we shall fail, we shall bring the demo cratic principle into disrepute, and the world will fast lose it. Democracy, therefore, is entitled to look to England to save and preserve her own child from utter and complete destruction.

Merrie England No sane person, however unpatriotic or however class conscious he or she may be, will deny that England gave to the world the arts of manufacture and the science of trade. Neither will any re sponsible student deny.that these things were de veloped in England by individual enterprise, and that our modern policy threatens to throwaway its manufactures and its trade and to substitute indus trial stagnation and the inactivity of Collectivism. So I go back to Blatchford, and I ask for Merrie England. I calion the Englishman to assert him self, not in any spirit of boastfulness, but in that sporting way that the English, of all people, really understand. Let us believe, as we are entitled to believe, that the Englishman is the best thing civilization has yet produced, and that we can, if we will, as an English race, develop a standard and a life which shall not only be happy and comfortable for ourselves, but which will be available by example to the rest of the world. Other nations are, of course, quite entitled to think better of themselves than they do of us, and if through competition and patriotism they are able to do better than we, they will in their turn render us the service of an example which we could with a clear conscience copy. Let us have, in a word, competition and patriotism for good.

The Merrie England of the future will differ from the Merrie England of the past. There will be nothing feudal about it. It will be entirely free from social snobbery . We are almost rid of the snobbery of what used to be regarded as the govern42 The Return to Laisser Faire ing classes. Our dukes and lords and millionaires are among the most humble people in the land, but we must resist the growth of the new snobbery. Our modern governors the bureaucrats, whether they draw their salaries from rates and taxes or from trade union funds, are in a fair way to establish a new brand of snobbishness, a new class conscious ness which is far worse than anything which oppressed·us in feudal times. Class consciousness is preached by people imbued with social snobbery and anxious to reap its rewards. Social snobbery is rapidly dying in the ranks of peers and baronets and bishops and other function aries, who have after all some historic claim to be .snobs, but it is developing fast and furious in other classes of life.

The trade union official is often a frightful snob. Your big trade union snob will talk eloquently about the workers and call them comrades from the platform, but the comradeship in question does not, with some of them at least, extend to the length of a game of bowls on a Sunday afternoon. Merrie England must rid itself of snobbery, and surely the real Englishman can be, if he will, as free from this particular vice as any living creature. By way of balance, for all things in life require to be balanced, we may have to develop, or rather re-develop, the patriotism of the Englishman, that delightful sense of national pride to which no human being is more entitled than the solid, sure, phleg matic, typical English philosopher. He must come out of his shell and begin to assert himself again.

Merrie England 43 He has overdone the self-effacement line of con duct, he just goes on quietly with the job, irritated if he gets any credit for it and lets the other man point out his failings, while he smokes his pipe or digs his garden or.plays his game of golf. The world wants more talk from the Englishman. There is no fear of his ever becoming spoilt with success like, for instance, the American. One of the few things that make me sometimes doubt the wisdom of material prosperity is the way in which it has puffed up the American. If slums and poverty and unemployment are essential to keep us humble, then perhaps there may be something to be said for these evils, but the Merrie Englishman will always be humble and need not have his slums and his poverty. We can always learn from others, but we must not forget that we have also something to teach.

CHAPTER IV PRODUCTION VERSUS POVERTY THIS will be known as the Age of the Committee, when activity was reduced to its minimum by the simple and popular device of passing all responsi bility over to somebody else. Many well-intentioned but deluded persons-·. even persons to whom is not attached the Socialist label-conceive that the well being of forty-three million individuals can be " organised." My ideas are not so wildly am bitious. I give the Almighty credit for having put into the brains of most of these millions rather more sense and ability than any politician· is willing to admit; and instead of organising them I only want to encourage each and everyone of them to develop his -native talents. :This is because I believe in the Gospel of Individualism and realise its tremendous import to the people of this country. The wealth of nations consists of Things. Poverty is the absence of a sufficient number of things. It is not a mere question of bread or houses, but of how much bread and how many houses in re lation to the number of people. We need more arithmetic and less cackle in the consideration of these matters.

Let us try to discover what it is that people want and how far it is possible to supply those wants. We shall be helped in our quest if we go back a little and, by way of preparation, try to find out and put down wh(~.t people wanted, say, one hundred years ago; what they had then and how far their wants 44 Production versus Poverty 45 have been met; what we now have, and examine the machinery and the processes that have brought about the improvement-if improvement there has been; see how, with our present knowledge, such machinery can be bettered and, generally discarding theory and rhetoric, do a little practical business study in arithmetic. First of all, where did people live a hundred years ago? There were ten or twelve millions of them in these little islands at the beginning of last century. Where did they sleep? What did they eat? What did they do when it rained? How did they keep themselves warm?