The financiers have their own ignis fatuus, which is that they can double the capital of the country, and thus give an immense stimulus to industrial development and production, by inflating the currency until prices rise to a point at which goods formerly marked £5o are marked Imo, a measure which does nothing nationally but enable every debtor to cheat his creditor, and every insurance company and pension fund to reduce by half the provision for which it has been paid. The history of inflation in Europe since the World War of 1914-18, and the resultant im poverishment of pensioners and officials with small fixed incomes, forces the middle classes to realise the appalling consequences of abandoning finance and industry to the direction of unskilled, politically ignorant, unpatriotic "practical business men." Meanwhile, the mobility of capital leads to struggles for the possession of exploitable foreign territories ("places in the sun"), producing war on a scale which threatens not only civilization but human existence ; for the old field combats between bodies of soldiers, from which women were shielded, are now replaced by attacks from the air on the civil population, in which women and men are slaughtered indiscriminately, making replacement of the killed impossible. The emotional reaction after such wars takes the form of acute disillusion, which further accelerates the moral revolt against capitalism without, unfortunately, producing any workable conception of an alternative. The proletarians are cynically sulky, no longer believing in the disinterestedness of those who appeal to them to make additional efforts and sacri fices to repair the waste of war. The moral mainspring of the private property system is broken; and it is the confiscations of unearned income, the extensions of municipal and national com munism, above all the new subsidies in aid of wages extorted from governments by threats of nationally disastrous lock-outs and strikes, which induce the proletariat to continue operating the capitalist system now that the old compulsion to work by imposing starvation as the alternative, fundamental in Capitalism, has had to be discarded in its primitive ruthlessness. The worker who refuses to work can now quarter himself on public relief (which means finally on confiscated property income) to an extent formerly impossible.
Democracy, or votes for everybody, does not produce con structive solutions of social problems; nor does compulsory schooling help much. Unbounded hopes were based on each suc cessive extension of the electoral franchise, culminating in the enfranchisement of women. These hopes have been disappointed, because the voters, male and female, being politically untrained and uneducated, have (a) no grasp of constructive measures, (b) loathe taxation as such, (c) dislike being governed at all, and (d) dread and resent any extension of official interference as an encroachment on their personal liberty. Compulsory schooling, far from enlightening them, inculcates the sacredness of private property, and stigmatizes a distributive state as criminal and disastrous, thereby continually renewing the old prejudices against. Socialism, and making impossible a national education dogmati cally inculcating as first principles the iniquity of private prop erty, the paramount social importance of equality of income, and the criminality of idleness.
Consequently, in spite of disillusion with capitalism, and the growing menace of failing trade and falling currencies, our democratic parliamentary oppositions, faced with the fact that the only real remedy involves increased taxation, compulsory re organization or frank nationalization of the bankrupt industries, and compulsory national service in civil as in military life for all classes, dare not confront their constituents with such pro posals, knowing that on increased taxation alone they would lose their seats. To escape responsibility, they look to the suppression of parliamentary institutions by coups d'etat and dictatorships, as in Italy, Spain, and Russia. This despair of parliamentary institutions is a striking novelty in the present century; but it has failed to awaken the democratic electorates to the fact that, having after a long struggle gained the power to govern, they have neither the knowledge nor the will to exercise it, and are in fact using their votes to keep government parochial when civilization is bursting the dikes of nationality in all directions.
A more effective resistance to property arises from the organi zation of the proletariat in trade unions to resist the effect of increase of population in cheapening labour and increasing its duration and severity. But Trade Unionism is itself a phase of Capitalism, inasmuch as it applies to labour as a commodity that principle of selling in the dearest market, and giving as little as possible for the price, which was formerly applied only to land, capital, and merchandise. Its method is that of a civil war between labour and capital in which the decisive battles are lock outs and strikes, with intervals of minor adjustment by industrial diplomacy. Trade Unionism now maintains a Labour party in the British Parliament. The most popular members and leaders are Socialists in theory; so that there is always a paper pro gramme of nationalization of industries and of banking, taxation of unearned incomes to extinction, and other incidentals of a transition to Socialism ; but the trade union driving force aims at nothing more than Capitalism with labour taking the lion's share, and energetically repudiates compulsory national service, which would deprive it of its power to strike. In this it is heartily seconded by the proprietary parties, which, though will ing enough to make strikes illegal and proletarian labour compul sory, will not pay the price of surrendering its own power to idle. Compulsory national service is essential in Socialism, which is thus deadlocked equally by organised labour and by Capitalism.
It is a historic fact, recurrent enough to be called an economic law, that Capitalism, which builds up great civilizations, also wrecks them if persisted in beyond a certain point. It is easy to demonstrate on paper that civilization can be saved and immensely developed by, at the right moment, discarding Capital ism and changing the private property profiteering state into the common property distributive state. But though the moment for the change has come again and again it has never been effected, because Capitalism has never produced the necessary enlightenment among the masses nor admitted to a controlling share in public affairs the order of intellect and character out side which Socialism, or indeed politics, as distinguished from mere party electioneering, is incomprehensible. Not until the two main tenets of Socialism—abolition of private property (which must not be confused with personal property), and equal ity of income—have taken hold of the people as religious dog mas, as to which no controversy is regarded as sane, will a stable Socialist state be possible. It should be observed, however, that of the two tenets, the need for equality of income is not the more difficult to demonstrate, because no other method of dis tribution is or ever has been possible. Omitting the few con spicuous instances in which actual earners of money make extraor dinary fortunes by exceptional personal gifts or strokes of luck, the existing differences of income among workers are not individual but corporate differences. Within the corporation no discrimination between individuals is possible : all common labour ers, like all upper division civil servants, are equally paid. The argument for equalizing the class incomes is that unequal dis tribution of purchasing power upsets the proper order of eco nomic production, causing luxuries to be produced on an extrava gant scale whilst the primitive vital needs of the people are left unsatisfied; that its effect on marriage, by limiting and corrupt ing sexual selection, is highly dysgenic ; that it reduces religion, legislation, education, and the administration of justice to absurd ity as between rich and poor; and that it creates an idolatry of riches and idleness which inverts all sane social morality.