 In this last division of my book I deal with the actual appearance of the survival state in certain laws and proposals now familiar to the industrial society of modern England. These are the patent objects, laws and projects of laws which lend stuff to my argument and show that it is based not upon a mere deduction, but upon an observation of things. Two forms of this proof are evident. First the laws and proposals which subject the proletariat to survival conditions. Next the fact that the capitalist so far from being expropriated by modern socialist experiments is being confirmed in his power. I take these in their order and I begin by asking in what statuettes or proposals the survival state first appeared among us. A false conception of our subject might lead one to find the origins of the survival state in the restrictions imposed upon certain forms of manufacture and the corresponding duties laid upon the capitalist in the interest of his workmen. The factory laws as they are in this country would seem to offer upon this superficial and erroneous view a starting point. They do nothing of the kind and the view is superficial and erroneous because it neglects the fundamentals of the case. What distinguishes the survival state is not the interference of law with the action of any citizen even in connection with industrial matters. Such interference may or may not indicate the presence of a survival status. It in no way indicates the presence of that status when it forbids a particular kind of human action to be undertaken by the citizen as a citizen. The legislature says for instance you may pluck roses but as I noticed you sometimes scratch yourself I will put you in prison unless you cut them with scissors at least 122 millimeters long and I will appoint 1000 inspectors to go around the country seeing whether the law is observed. My brother-in-law shall be at the head of the department at 2000 a year. We are all familiar with that type of legislation. We are all familiar with the arguments for and against it in any particular case. We may regard it as erroneous, futile or beneficent or in any other light according to our various temperaments but it does not fall within the category of survival legislation because it establishes no distinction between two classes of citizens marking off one as legally distinct from the other by a criterion of manual labor or of income. This is even true of such regulations as those which compel a cotton mill for instance to have no less than such and such an amount of cubic space for each operative and such and such protection for dangerous machinery. These laws do not concern themselves with the nature, the amount, or even the existence of a contract for service. The object for example of the law which compels one to fence off certain types of machinery is simply to protect human life regardless of whether the human being so protected is rich or poor, capitalist or proletarian. These laws may in effect work in our society so that the capitalist is made responsible for the proletarian but he is not responsible quid capitalist nor is the proletarian protected quid proletarian. In the same way the law may compel me if I am a riparian owner to put up a fence of statutory strength wherever the water of my river is of more than a statutory depth. Now it cannot compel me to do this unless I am the owner of the land. In a sense therefore this might be called the recognition of my status because by the nature of the case only landowners can be affected by the law and landowners would be compelled by it to safeguard the lives of all whether they were or were not owners of land. But the category so established would be purely accidental. The object and method of the law do not concern themselves with the distinction between citizens. A close observer might indeed discover certain points in the factory laws, details and phrases which did distinctly connotate the existence of a capitalist and of a proletarian class. But we must take the statutes as a whole and the order in which they were produced, above all, the general motive and expression governing each main statute in order to judge whether such examples of interference give us an origin or not. The verdict will be that they do not. Such legislation may be oppressive in any degree or necessary in any degree, but it does not establish status in the place of contract and it is not therefore servile. Neither are those laws servile, which in practice attach to the poor and not to the rich. Compulsory education is, in legal theory, required of every citizen for his children. The state of mind which goes with plutocracy exempts, of course, all above a certain standard of wealth from this law. But the law does apply to the universality of the Commonwealth and all families resident in Great Britain, not in Ireland, are subject to its provisions. These are not origins. A true origin to the legislation I approach comes later. The first example of servile legislation to be discovered upon the statute book is that which establishes the present form of employer's liability. I am far from saying that that law was passed as modern laws are beginning to be passed with the direct object of establishing a new status, though it was passed with some consciousness on the part of the legislator that such a new status was in existence as a social fact. His motive was merely humane, and the relief which he had afforded seemed merely necessary at the time. But it is an instructive example of the way in which a small neglect of strict doctrine and a slight toleration of anomaly admit great changes into the state. There had existed from all time in every community, and there was founded upon common sense the legal doctrine that if one citizen was so placed with regard to another by contract, that he must in the fulfillment of that contract perform certain services. And if those services accidentally involved damages to a third party, not the actual perpetrator of the damage, but he who designed the particular operation leading to it, was responsible. The point is subtle, but as I say fundamental, it involves no distinction of status between employer and employed. Citizen A offered Citizen B a sack of wheat down if Citizen B would plow for him a piece of land, which might or might not produce more than a sack of wheat. Of course, Citizen A expected it would produce more, and was awaiting a surplus value, or he would not have made the contract with Citizen B. But at any rate, Citizen B put his name to the agreement and as a free man capable of contracting, was correspondingly bound to fulfill it. In fulfilling this contract, the plow share B is driving, destroys a pipe, conveying water by agreement through A's land to C. C suffers damage, and to recover the equivalent of that damage, his action in justice and common sense can only be against A. For B was carrying out a plan and instruction of which A was the author. C is a third party who had nothing to do with such a contract and could not possibly have justice, saved by his chances of getting it from A, who was the true author of the unintentional laws inflicted, since he designed the course of the work. But when the damage is not done to C at all, but to B, who is concerned with the work, the risks of which are known and willingly undertaken, it is quite another matter. Citizen A contracts with Citizen B, that Citizen B, in consideration of a sack of wheat, shall plow a bit of land. Certain known risks much attached to that operation. Citizen B, if he is a free man, undertakes those risks with his eyes open. For instance, he may sprain his wrist in turning the plow, or one of the horses may kick him while he is having his bread and cheese. If upon such an accident A is compelled to pay damages to B, a difference of status is at once recognized. B undertook to do work which, by all theory of free contract, was with its risks and expense of energy. He equivalent in B's own eyes of a sack of wheat. Yet a law is passed to say that B can have more than that sack of wheat, if he is heard. There is no converse right of A against B. If the employer suffers by such an accident to the employee, he is not allowed to dock that sack of wheat, though it was regarded in the contract as the equivalent to a certain amount of labor to be performed, which, as a fact, has not been performed. A has no action, unless B has been culpably negligent or remiss. In other words, the mere fact that one man is working and another not is the fundamental consideration on which the law is built, and the law says you are not a free man making a free contract with all its consequences. You are a worker, and therefore an inferior. You are an employee, and that status gives you a special position which would not be recognized in the other party to the contract. The principle is pushed still further when an employer is made liable for an accident happening to one of his employees at the hands of another employee. A gives a sack of wheat to B and D, each, if they will dig a well for him. All three parties are cognizant of their risks and accept them in the contract. B, holding the rope on which D is lowered, lets it slip. If they were all three men of exactly equal status, obviously D's action would be against B. But they are not of equal status in England today. B and D are employees, and are therefore in a special and inferior position before the law compared with their employer, A. D's action is, by this novel principle, no longer against B, who accidentally injured him by a personal act, however involuntary, for which a free man would be responsible, but against A, who was innocent of the whole business. Now, in all this it is quite clear that A has peculiar duties, not because he is a citizen, but because he is something more, an employer. And B and D have special claims on A, not because they are citizens, but because they are something less, these employees. They can claim protection from A as inferiors of a superior in a state admitting such distinctions and patronage. It will occur at once to the reader that in our existing social state, the employee will be very grateful for such legislation. One workman cannot recover from another simply because the other will have no goods out of which to pay damages. Let the burden therefore fall upon the rich man. Excellent. But that is not the point. To argue thus is to say that survival legislation is necessary if we are to solve the problems raised by capitalism. It remains survival legislation nonetheless. It is legislation that would not exist in a society where property was well divided, and where a citizen could normally pay damages for the harm he had himself caused. This first trickle of the stream, however, though it is of considerable historical interest as a point of departure, is not a very definite moment to our subject compared with the great bulk of later proposals, some of which are already law, others upon the point of becoming law, and which definitely recognize the survival state, the reestablishment of status in the place of contract, and the universal division of citizens into two categories of employers and employed. These last merit a very different consideration, for they will represent to history the conscious and designed entry of survival institutions into the old Christian state. They are not origins, small indications of coming change which the historian will painfully discover as a curiosity. They are the admitted foundations of a new order, deliberately planned by a few, confusedly accepted by the many, as the basis upon which a novel and stable society shall arise to replace the unstable and passing phase of capitalism. If working men are concerned in the other professional classes, if I contract to ride for a publisher, a complete history of the county of Rutland, and the pursuit of the task, while examining some object of historical interest, fall down a pit, I should not be able to recover against the publisher, but if I dress in mean clothes and the same publisher deceived gives me a month's work at cleaning out his ornamental water, and I am wounded in that occupation by a fierce fish, he will be malted to my advantage, and that roundly. They fall roughly into three categories. One, measures by which the insecurity of the proletariat shall be relieved through the action of the employing class or of the proletariat itself acting under compulsion. Two, measures by which the employer shall be compelled to give not less than a certain minimum for any labor he may purchase. And three, measures which compel a man lacking the means of production to labor, though he may have made no contract to that effect. The last two, as will be seen in a moment, are the complementary one of another. As to the first, measures to palliate the insecurity of the proletariat, we have this, an example in actual law at the moment, and that law is the Insurance Act, whose political source and motive I am not here discussing. It follows in every particular the lines of a survival state. Its fundamental criterion is employment. In other words, I am compelled to enter a scheme providing me against the mischances of illness and unemployment, not because I am a citizen, but only if I am exchanging services for goods, and either obtaining less than a certain amount of goods for those services, or a vulgar fellow working with his hands. The law carefully excludes from its provisions those forms of labor to which the educated, and therefore powerful classes, a resubject and further excludes from the compulsion of the masses of those who are the moment earning enough to make them a class to be reckoned with as economically free. I may be a writer of books who, should he fall ill, will leave in the greatest distress the family which he supports. If the legislator were concerned for the morals of citizens, I should most undoubtedly come under this law under the form of a compulsory insurance added to my income tax. But the legislator is not concerned with people of my sort. He is concerned with a new status which he recognizes in the state, to it the proletariat. He envisions the proletariat not quite accurately as men either poor or, if they are not poor, at any rate vulgar people working with their hands, and he legislates accordingly. Still more striking as an example of status, taking the place of contract, is the fact that this law puts the duty of controlling the proletariat, and of seeing that the law is obeyed, not upon the proletariat itself, but upon the capitalist class. Now this point is of an importance that cannot be exaggerated. The future historian, whatever his interest in the first indications of that profound revolution through which we are so rapidly passing, will most certainly fix upon that one point as the cardinal landmark of our times. The legislator, surveying the capitalist state, proposes as a remedy for certain of its evil, the establishment of two categories in the state, compels the lower man to registration, to a tax, and the rest of it, and further compels the upper man to be the instrument in enforcing that registration and in collecting that tax. No one acquainted with the way in which any one of the great changes of the past has taken place. The substitution of tenure for the Roman proprietary right in land, or the substitution of the medieval peasant for the serf at the Dark Ages, can possibly misunderstand the significance of such a turning point in our history. Whether it will be completed or whether a reaction will destroy it is another matter. It's mere proposal is one of the greatest possible moment in the inquiry we are here pursuing. Of the next two groups, the fixing of a minimum wage and the compulsion to labor, which as I have said and will shortly show are complementary one to the other, neither has yet appeared in actual legislation, but both are planned, both thought out, both possessed of powerful advocates, and both upon the threshold of positive law. The fixing of a minimum wage with a definite sum fixed by statuette has not yet entered our laws. But the first step towards such a consummation has been taken in the shape of giving legal sanction to some hypothetical minimum wage, which shall be arrived at after discussion within a particular trade. That trade is, of course, the mining industry. The law does not say no capitalist shall pay a miner less than so many shillings for so many hours' work, but it does say, figures having been arrived at by local boards, any miner working within the area of each board can claim by force of law the minimum sum established by such boards. It is evident that from this step to the next step, which shall define some sliding scale of renumeration for labor, according to prices and the profits of capital, is an easy and natural transition. It would give both parties what each immediately requires. To capital a guarantee against disturbance, to labor sufficiency and security. The whole thing is an excellent object lesson in little of that general movement from free contract to status, and from the capitalist to survival state, which is the tide of our time. The neglect of older principles, as abstract and doctrinaire and immediate need of both parties immediately satisfied. The unforeseen but necessary consequence of satisfying such needs in such a fashion as these, which are apparent in the settlement the mining industry has begun, are the typical forces producing the survival state. The proletarian accepts a position in which he produces for the capitalist a certain total of economic value, and retains out of that total a portion only, leaving to the capitalist all surplus value. The capitalist on his side is guaranteed in the secure and permanent expectation of that surplus value, through all the perils of social envy. The proletarian is guaranteed in a sufficiency and a security for that sufficiency. But by the very action of such a guaranteeing, there is withdrawn from him the power to refuse his labor, and thus to aim at putting himself in possession of the means of production. Such schemes definitely divide citizens into two classes, the capitalist and the proletarian. They may get impossible for the second to combat the privileged position of the first. They introduce into the positive laws of the community a recognition of social facts which already divide Englishmen into two groups of economically more free and economically less free, and they stamp with the authority of the state a new constitution of society. Society is recognized as no longer consisting of free men bargaining freely for their labor or any other commodity in their possession, but of two contrasting status, owners and non-owners. The first must not be allowed to leave the second without subsistence, the second must not be allowed to obtain that grip upon the means of production, which is the privilege of the first. It is true that this first experiment is small in degree and tentative in quality, but to judge the movement as a general whole we must not only consider the expression it has actually received so far in positive law, but the mood of our time. When this first experiment in a minimum wage was being debated in Parliament, what was the great issue of debate? Upon what did those who were the most ardent reformers particularly insist? Not that the miners should have an avenue open to them for obtaining possession of the mines, not even that the state should have an avenue open to it for obtaining possession, but that the minimum wage should be fixed at a certain satisfactory level. That, as our recent experience testifies for all of us, was the crux of the quarrel, and that such a point should be the crux, not the socialism of the mines nor the admission of the proletariat to the means of production, but only a sufficiency and a security of wage, is amply significant of the perhaps irresistible forces which are making in the direction for which I argue in this book. There was here no attempt to the capitalists to impose survival conditions nor of the proletarian to resist them. Both parties were agreed upon that fundamental change. The discussion turned upon the minimum limit of subsistence to be securely provided, a point which left aside, because it took for granted, the establishment of some minimum in any case. Next, let it be noted, for it is a moment to a latter part of my argument, that experiments of this sort promise to extend piecemeal. There is no likelihood, judging by men's actions and speech, of some grand general scheme for the establishment of a minimum wage throughout the community. Such a scheme would of course be as truly an establishment of the survival state as piecemeal schemes. But as we shall see in a moment, the extension of the principal piecemeal has a considerable effect upon the forms which compulsion may take. The miners, refusal to work with the exaggerated panic it caused, bred this first tentative appearance of the minimum wage in our laws. Normally, capital prefers free labor with its margin of destitution, for such an anarchy, ephemeral though it is of its nature, while it last provides cheap labor. From the narrowest point of view, it provides in the still competitive areas of capitalism a better chance for profits. But as one group of workmen after another, concerned with trades, immediately necessary to the life of the nation, and therefore tolerating but little interruption, learn the power which combination gives them, it is inevitable that the legislator, concentrated as he is upon momentary remedies for difficulties as they arise, should propose for one such trade after another the remedy of a minimum wage. There can be little doubt that, trade by trade, the principal will extend. For instance, the two and a half millions now guaranteed against unemployment are guaranteed against it for a certain weekly sum. That weekly sum must bear some relation to their estimated earnings when they are in employment. It is a short step from the calculation of unemployment benefit. It is being fixed by a statute at a certain level, and that level determined by something which is regarded as the just renumeration of labor in that trade. It is a short step, I say, from that to a statutory fixing of the sums paid during employment. The state says to the surf, I saw to it that you should have so much when you are unemployed. I find that in some rare cases my arrangement leads to you getting more when you are unemployed than when you are employed. I further find that in many cases, though you get more when you are employed, yet the difference is not sufficient to tempt the lazy man to work, or to make him take any particular trouble to get work. I am a see to this. The provision of a fixed schedule during unemployment thus inevitably leads to the examination, the defining, and at last the imposition of a minimum wage during employment, and every compulsory provision for unemployment benefits is the seed of a minimum wage. Of still greater effect is the mere presence of state regulation in such a matter. The fact that the state has begun to gather statistics of wages over these large areas of industry, and to do so not form a statistical object, but a practical one, and the fact that the state has begun to immix the action of positive law and the constraint with the older system of free bargaining, means that the whole weight of its influence is now in favor of regulation. It is no rash prophecy to assert that in the near future our industrial society will see a gradually extending area of industry, in which from two sides the fixing of wages by statute shall appear. From one side it will come in the form of the state examining the conditions of labor in connection with its own scheme for establishing sufficiency and security by insurance. From the other side it will come through the reasonable proposals to make contracts between groups of labor and groups of capital enforceable in the course. So much then for the principle of minimum wage. It has already appeared in our laws, it is certain to spread, but how does the presence of this introduction of a minimum form part of the advance towards a survival state? I have said that the principle of a minimum wage involves as its converse the principle of compulsory labor. Indeed, most of the importance which the principle of a minimum wage has for this inquiry lies in that converse necessity of compulsory labor which it involves. But as the connection between the two may not be clear at first sight, we must do more than take it for granted. We must establish it by a process of reason. There are two distinct forms in which the whole policy of enforcing security and sufficiency by law for the proletariat produces a corresponding policy of compulsory labor. The first of these forms is the compulsion which the courts will exercise upon either of the parties concerned in the giving and the receiving of the minimum wage. The second form is the necessity under which society will find itself when, once the principle of the minimum wage is conceded, coupled with the principles of sufficiency and security, to maintain those whom the minimum wage excludes from the area of normal employment. The end of Section 16 As to the first form, a proletarian group has struck a bargain with a group of capitalists to the effect that it will produce for that capital ten measures of value in a year. We'll be content to receive six measures of value for itself, and we'll leave four measures as surplus value for the capitalists. The bargain is ratified. The courts have the power to enforce it. If the capitalists, by some trick of fines or by bluntly breaking their word, pay out in wages less than the six measures. The courts must have some power of constraining them. In other words, there must be some sanction to the action of the laws, there must be some power of punishment, and through punishment of compulsion. Conversely, if the men having struck this bargain go back upon their word, if individuals among them or sections among them cease work with a new demand for seven measures instead of six, the courts must have the power of constraining and of punishing them. Where the bargain is ephemeral, or at any rate extended over only reasonable limits of time, it would be straining language, perhaps, to say that each individual case of constraint exercised against the workmen, would be a case of compulsory labor. But extend the system over a long period of years, make it normal to industry, and accept it as a habit in men's daily conception of the way in which their lives should be conducted, and the method is necessarily transformed into a system of compulsory labor. In trades where wages fluctuate little, this will obviously be the case. You, the agricultural laborers of this district, have taken fifteen shillings a week for a very long time. It has worked perfectly well. There seems no reason why you should have more. Nay, you put your hands to it through your officials in the years so and so that you regarded the sum as sufficient. Such and such of your members are now refusing to perform what this court regards as a contract. They must return within the limits of that contract or suffer the consequences. Remember what power analogy exercises over men's mind, and how when systems of the sword are common to many trades, they will tend to create a general point of view for all trades. Remember also how comparatively slight a threat is already sufficient to control men in our industrial society. The proletarian mass of which is accustomed to live from week to week under peril of discharge, and has grown readily amenable to the threat of any reduction in those wages upon which it can but just subsist. Nor are the courts enforcing such contracts, or quasi-contracts, as they will come to be regarded. The only inducement. A man has been compelled by law to put aside sums from his wages as insurance against unemployment, but he is no longer the judge of how such sums shall be used. They are not in his possession. They are not even in the hands of some society which he can really control. They are in the hands of a government official. Here is work offered you at twenty-five shillings a week. If you do not take it, you certainly shall not have a right to the money you have been compelled to put aside. If you will take it, the sum shall still stand to your credit, and when next in my judgment your unemployment is not due to your recalcitrance and refusal to labor, I will permit you to have some of your money, not otherwise. Dovetailing in with this machinery of compulsion is all that mass of registration and docketing which is accumulating through the use of labor exchanges. Not only will the official have the power to enforce special contracts, or the power to coerce individual men to labor under the threat of a fine, but he will also have a series of dossiers by which the record of each workman can be established. No man, once so registered and known, can escape, and of the nature of the system, the numbers caught in the net must steadily increase until the whole mass of labor is mapped out and controlled. These are very powerful instruments of compulsion indeed. They already exist. They are already a part of our laws. Lastly there is the obvious bludgeon of compulsory arbitration, a bludgeon so obvious that it is revolting even to our proletariat. Indeed I know of no civilized European state which has succumbed to so gross a suggestion, for it is a frank admission of servitude at one step and for good and all, such as men in our culture are not yet prepared to swallow. So much then for the first argument and the first form, in which compulsory labor is seen to be a direct and necessary consequence of establishing a minimum wage and of scheduling employment to a scale. The second is equally clear. In the production of wheat, the healthy and skilled man who can produce ten measures of wheat is compelled to work for six measures, and the capitalist is compelled to remain content with four measures for his share. The law will punish him if he tries to get out of his legal obligation and to pay his workmen less than six measures of wheat during the year. What of the man who is not sufficiently strong or skilled to produce even six measures? Will the capitalist be constrained to pay him more than the values he can produce? Most certainly not. The whole structure of production, as it was erected during the capitalist phase of our industry, has been left intact by the new laws and customs. Profit is still left a necessity. If it were destroyed, still more, if a loss were imposed by law, that would be a contradiction of the whole spirit in which all these reforms are being undertaken. They are being undertaken with the object of establishing stability where there is now instability, and of reconciling, as the ironic phrase goes, the interests of capital and labor. It would be impossible, without a general ruin, to compel capital to lose upon the man who is not worth even the minimum wage. How shall that element of insecurity and instability be eliminated? To support the man gratuitously because he cannot earn a minimum wage, when all the rest of the common wealth is working for its guaranteed wages, is to put a premium upon incapacity and sloth. The man must be made to work. He must be taught, if possible, to produce those economic values which are regarded as the minimum of sufficiency. He must be kept at that work, even if he cannot produce the minimum, lest his presence as a free laborer should imperil the whole scheme of the minimum wage, and introduce at the same time a continuous element of instability. Hence he is necessarily a subject for forced labor. We have not yet in this country established by force of law the right to this form of compulsion, but it is an inevitable consequence of those other reforms which have just been reviewed. The labor colony, a prison so-called because euphemism is necessary to every transition, will be erected to absorb this surplus, and that last form of compulsion will crown the edifice of these reforms. They will then be complete so far as the subject classes are concerned, and even though this particular institution of the labor colony, logically the last of all, preceding time, other forms of compulsion, it will make the advent of those other forms of compulsion more certain, facile, and rapid. There remains one last remark to be made upon the concrete side of my subject. I have in this last section illustrated the tendency toward the survival state from actual laws and actual projects which are all today familiar in English industrial society, and I have shown how these are certainly establishing the proletariat in a novel but to them satisfactory survival status. It remains to point out in a very few lines the complementary truth that what should be the very essence of collectivist reform to wit, the translation of the means of production from the hands of private owners to the hands of public officials, is nowhere being attempted. So far from its being attempted, all so-called socialistic experiments in municipalization and nationalization are merely increasing the dependence of the community upon the capitalist class. To prove this we need only observe that every single one of these experiments is affected by a loan. Now what is meant in economic reality by these municipal loans and national loans raised for the purpose of purchasing certain small sections of the means of production? Certain capitalists own a number of rail cars, etc. They put to work upon these certain proletarians, and the result is a certain total of economic values. Let the surplus values obtainable by the capitalist, after the subsistence of the proletarians is provided for, amount to ten thousand a year. We all know how a system of this sort is municipalized. A loan is raised, it bears interest, it is saddled with a sinking fund. Now this loan is not really made in money, though the terms of it are in money. It is, at the end of a long string of exchanges, nothing more nor less than the loans of the cars, the rails, etc., by the capitalists to the municipality, and the capitalists require before they will strike the bargain, a guarantee that the whole of their old profit shall be paid to them. Together, with a further yearly sum, which after a certain number of years, shall represent the original value of the concern when they handed it over. These last additional sums are called the sinking fund. The continued payment of the old surplus values is called the interest. In theory, certain small sections of the means of production might be acquired in this way. That particular section would have been socialized. The sinking fund, that is the paying of the capitalists for their plant by installments, might be met out of the general taxation imposed on the community, considering how large that is compared with any one experiment of the kind. The interest made by good management be met out of the true profits of the tramways. At the end of a certain number of years, the community will be in possession of the tramways, will no longer be exploited in this particular bicapitalism, will have bought out capitalism from the general taxes, and insofar as the purchase money paid has been consumed and not saved or invested by the capitalists, a small measure of socialization will have been achieved. As a fact, things are never so favorable. In practice, three conditions militate against even these tiny experiments in expropriation. The fact that the implements are always sold at much more than their true value, the fact that the purchase includes non-productive things, and the fact that the rate of borrowing is much faster than the rate of repayment. These three adverse conditions lead in practice to nothing but the riveting of capitalism more securely around the body of the state. For what is it that is paid for when a tramway, for instance, is taken over? Is it the true capital alone, the actual plant, which is paid for, even at an exaggerated price, far from it? Over and above the rails and the cars, there are all the commissions that have been made, all the champagne luncheons, all the lawyer's fees, all the compensations to this man and to that man, all the bribes. Nor does this exhaust the argument. Tramways represent a productive investment. What about pleasure gardens, wash houses, baths, libraries, monuments, and the rest. The greater part of these things are the product of loans. When you put up a public institution, you borrow the bricks and the mortar and the iron and the wood and the tiles from capitalists, and you pledge yourself to pay interest and to produce a sinking fund, precisely as though a town hall or a bath were a piece of reproductive machinery. To this must be added the fact that a considerable proportion of the purchases are failures, purchases of things just before they are driven out by some new invention. While on the top of the whole business you have the fact that the borrowing goes on at a far greater rate than the repayment. In a word, all these experiments up and down Europe during our generation, municipal and national, have resulted in an indebtedness to capital increasing, rather more than twice, but not three times as fast as the rate of repayment. The interest which the capital demands with a complete indifference as to whether the loan is productive or nonproductive amounts to rather more than 10% excessive over the produce of the various experiments, even though we count in the most lucrative and successful of these, such as the state railways of many countries and thoroughly successful municipal enterprises of many modern towns. Capitalism has seen to it that it shall be a winner and not a loser by this form of sham socialism as by every other, and the same forces which in practice forbid confiscation see to it that the attempt to mass confiscation by purchase shall not only fail, but shall turn against those who have not had the courage to make a frontal attack upon privilege. With these concrete examples showing how collectivism in attempting its practice does but confirm the capitalist position and showing how our laws have already begun to impose a survival status upon the proletariat, I end the argumentative thesis of this book. I believe I have proved my case. The future of industrial society, and in particular of English society, left to its own direction, is a future in which subsistence and security shall be guaranteed for the proletariat, but shall be guaranteed at the expense of the old political freedom and by the establishment of that proletariat in a status really, though not nominally, survival. At the same time the owners will be guaranteed in their profits the whole machinery of production in the smoothness of its working, and that stability which has been lost under the capitalist phase of society will be found once more. The internal strains which have threatened society during its capitalist phase will be relaxed and eliminated, and the community will settle down upon the survival basis, which was its foundation before the advent of the Christian faith, from which that faith slowly weaned it, and to which, in the decay of that faith, it naturally returns. It is possible to portray a great social movement of the past with accuracy and in detail, if one can spare to the task the time necessary for research, and further bring to it a certain power of coordination by which a great mass of detail can be integrated and made one whole. Such a task is rarely accomplished, but it does not exceed the powers of history. With regard to the future it is otherwise. No one can say, even in its largest aspect or upon its chief structural line, what the future will be. He can only present the main tendencies of his time. He can only determine the equation of the curve and presume that the equation will apply more or less to its next developments. So far as I can judge, those societies which broke with the continuity of Christian civilization in the sixteenth century, which means roughly North Germany and Great Britain, tend to add present to the reestablishment of a survival status. It will be diversified by a local accident modified by a local character, hidden under many forms, but it will come. That the mere capitalist anarchy cannot endure is patent to all men. That only a very few possible solutions to it exist should be equally patent to all. For my part, as I have said in these pages, I do not believe there are more than two, a reaction toward well-divided property or the reestablishment of servitude. I cannot believe that theoretical collectivism, now so plainly failing, will ever inform a real and living society. But my conviction that the reestablishment of the survival status in the industrial society is actually upon us does not lead me to any meager and mechanical prophecy of what the future of Europe shall be. The force of which I have been speaking is not the only force in the field. There is a complex not of forces underlying any nation once Christian, a smoldering of the old fires. Moreover, one can point to European societies which will most certainly reject any such solution of our capitalist problem, just as the same societies have either rejected or live suspicious of capitalism itself, and have rejected or live suspicious of that industrial organization which till lately identified itself with progress and national well-being. These societies are in the main the same as those which in that great storm of the 16th century, the capital episode in the story of Christendom, held fast to tradition, and saved the continuity of morals. Chief among them should be noted today, the French and the Irish. I would record it as an impression and no more, that the survival state, strong as the tide is making for it in Prussia and in England today, will be modified, checked perhaps, defeated and more, certainly halted in its attempt to establish itself completely by the strong reaction which these freer societies upon its flank will perpetually exercise. Ireland has decided for a free peasantry, and our generation has seen the solid foundation of that institution laid. In France, the many experiments which elsewhere have successfully introduced the survival state have been contemptuously rejected by the populace, and, most significant, a recent attempt to register and to ensure the artisans as a separate category of citizens has broken down in the face of a universal and virile contempt. That this second factor in the development of the future, the presence of free societies, will destroy the tendency to the survival state elsewhere, I do not affirm, but I believe that it will modify that tendency, certainly by example and perhaps by direct attack, and as I am upon the whole hopeful that the faith will recover its intimate and guiding place in the heart of Europe, so I believe that this sinking back into our original paganism, for the tendency to the survival state, is nothing less, will in due time be halted and reversed.