 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Survile State by Hilaire Belog. If we do not restore the institution of property, we cannot escape restoring the institution of slavery. There is no third course. Section 1. Synopsis of the Survile State. Introduction. The subject of this book. It is written to maintain the thesis that industrial society, as we know it, will tend towards the reestablishment of slavery. The sections into which the book will be divided. Section 1. Definitions, what wealth is, and why necessary to man, how produced, the meaning of the words capital, proletariat, property, means of production, the definition of the capitalist state, the definition of the survival state, what it is and what it is not, the reestablishment of status in the place of contract. That servitude is not a question of degree, but of kind. Summary of these definitions. Section 2. Our civilization was originally survival. The Survile Institution in Pagan Antiquity. Its fundamental character. A pagan society took it for granted. The institution disturbed by the advent of the Christian Church. Section 3. How the Survile Institution was for a time dissolved. The subconscious effect of the faith in this matter. The main elements of pagan economic society. The Villa. The transformation of the agricultural slave into the Christian surf. Next into the Christian peasant. The corresponding erection throughout Christendom of the distributive state. It is nearly complete at the close of the Middle Ages. It was not machinery that lost us our freedom. It was the loss of a free mind. Section 4. How the distributive state failed. This failure, original in England. This story of decline from distributive property to capitalism. The economic revolution of the 16th century. The confiscation of monastic land. What might have happened had the state retained it. As a fact that land is captured by an oligarchy. England is capitalist before the advent of the industrial revolution. Therefore modern industry proceeding from England has grown in a capitalist mold. Section 5. The capitalist state in proportion as it grows perfect grows unstable. It can of its nature be but a transitory phase lying between an earlier and a later stable state of society. The two internal strains which render it unstable. A. The conflict between its social realities and its moral and legal basis. B. The insecurity and insufficiency to which it condemns free citizens. The few possessors can grant or withhold livelihood from the many non-possessors. Capitalism is so unstable that it dares not proceed to its own logical conclusion. It tends to restrict competition among owners and insecurity and insufficiency among non-owners. Section 6. The stable solutions of this instability. The three stable social arrangements which alone can take the place of unstable capitalism. The distributive solution. The collectivist solution. The servile solution. The reformer will not openly advocate the servile solution. There remains only the distributive and the collectivist solution. Section 7. Socialism is the easiest apparent solution of the capitalist crux. A contrast between the reformer making for distribution and the reformer making for socialism or collectivism. The difficulties met by the first type. The second is working with the grain. Collectivism. A natural development of capitalism. It appeals to both capitalists and proletarians. Nonetheless, we shall see that the collectivist attempt is doomed to fail and to produce a thing very different from its object to wit the servile state. Section 8. The reformers and the reformed are both making for the servile state. There are two types of reformers working along the line of least resistance. These are the socialist and the practical man. The socialist again is of two kinds. The humanist and the statistician. The humanist would like both to confiscate from the owners and to establish security and sufficiency for the non-owners. He is allowed to do the second thing by establishing servile conditions. He is forbidden to do the first. The statistician is quite content so long as he can run and organize the poor. Both are canalized towards the servile state and both are shepherded off their ideal collectivist state. Meanwhile, the great mass, the proletariat upon whom the reformers are at work, though retaining the instinct of ownership, has lost any experience of it and is subject to a private law much more than to the law of the courts. This is exactly what happened in the past during the converse change from slavery to freedom. Private law became stronger than public at the beginning of the Dark Ages. The owners welcomed the changes which maintained them in ownership and yet increased the security of their revenue. Today the non-owners will welcome whatever keeps them away during class increases their wages and their security without insisting on the expropriation of the owners and appendix showing that the collectivist proposal to buy out the capitalist in lieu of expropriating him is in vain. Section 9 The Servile State has begun. The manifestation of the Servile State in law or proposals of law will fall into two sorts. A. Laws or proposals of law compelling the proletariat to work. B. Financial operations riveting the grip of capitalists more strongly upon society. As to A. We find it already at work in measures such as the insurance act and proposals such as compulsory arbitration, the enforcement of trades union bargains and the erection of labor colonies etc. for the unemployable. As to the second, we find that so-called municipal or socialist experiments in acquiring the means of production have already increased and are continually increasing the dependence of society upon the capitalist. Introduction The Subject of This Book This book is written to maintain and prove the following truth, that our free modern society in which the means of production are owned by a few being necessarily in unstable equilibrium, it is tending to reach a condition of stable equilibrium by the establishment of compulsory labor legally enforceable upon those who do not own the means of production for the advantage of those who do. With this principle of compulsion applied against the non-owners, there must also come a difference in their status and in the eyes of society and of its positive law men will be divided into two sets. The first economically free and politically free possessed of the means of production and securely confirmed in that possession. The second economically unfree and politically unfree but at first secured by their very lack of freedom in certain necessaries of life and in a minimum of well-being beneath which they shall not fall. Society having reached such a condition would be released from its present internal strains and would have taken on a form which would be stable, that is capable of being indefinitely prolonged without change. In it would be resolved the various factors of instability which increasingly disturb that form of society called capitalist and men would be satisfied to accept and to continue in such a settlement. To such a stable society I shall give four reasons which will be described in the next section, the title of the survival state. I shall not undertake to judge whether this approaching organization of our modern society be good or evil. I shall concern myself only with showing the necessary tendency towards it which has long existed and the recent social provisions which show that it has actually begun. This new state will be acceptable to those who desire consciously or by implication, the re-establishment among us of a difference of status between possessors and non-possessor. It will be distasteful to those who regard such a distinction with ill favor or with dread. My business will not be to enter into the discussion between these two types of modern thinkers, but to point out to each and to both that that which the one favors and the other would fly is upon them. I shall prove my thesis in particular from the case of the industrial society of Great Britain, including that small alien and exceptional corner of Ireland which suffers or enjoys industrial conditions today. I shall divide the matter thus. One, I shall lay down certain definitions. Two, next I shall describe the institution of slavery and the survival state, which is the basis as these were in the ancient world. I shall then, three, sketch very briefly the process whereby that age-long institution of slavery was slowly dissolved during the Christian centuries and whereby the resulting medieval system, based upon highly divided property in the means of production, was, four, wrecked in certain areas of Europe as it approached completion and had substituted for it in practice, though not in legal theory, the society based upon capitalism. Five, next I shall show how capitalism was of its nature unstable because its social realities were in conflict with all existing or possible systems of law and because its effects in denying sufficiency and security were intolerable to men. How being thus unstable it consequently presented a problem which demanded a solution to wit the establishment of some stable form of society whose law and social practice should correspond and whose economic results by providing sufficiency and security should be tolerable to human nature. Six, I shall next present the only three possible solutions. A, collectivism or the placing of the means of production in the hands of the political officers of the community. B, property or the re-establishment of a distributive state in which the mass of citizens should severally own the means of production. C, slavery or a survival state in which those who do not own the means of production shall be legally compelled to work for those who do and shall receive in exchange a security of livelihood. Now seeing the distaste which the remains of our long Christian tradition has bred in us for directly advocating the third solution and boldly supporting the re-establishment of slavery, the first two alone are open to reformers. One, a reaction towards a condition of well-divided property or the distributive state. Two, an attempt to achieve the ideal collectivist state. It can easily be shown that this second solution appeals most naturally and easily to a society already capitalist on account of the difficulty which such a society has to discover the energy, the will and the vision requisite for the first solution. Seven, I shall next proceed to show how the pursuit of this ideal collectivist state which is bread of capitalism leads man acting upon a capitalist society not towards the collectivist state nor anything like it but to that third utterly different thing, the survival state. To this eighth section I shall add an appendix showing how the attempt to achieve collectivism gradually by public purchase is based upon an illusion. Eight, recognizing that theoretical argument of this kind though intellectually convincing is not sufficient to the establishment of my thesis I shall conclude by giving examples from modern English legislation which examples prove that the survival state is actually upon us. Such is the scheme I designed for this book. The end of section one. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org The Survival State by Hilaire Bellock Section 2 Section 1 Definitions The First Definitions Man, like every other organism, can only live by the transformation of his environment to his own use. He must transform his environment from a condition where it is less to a condition where it is more subservient to his needs. That special conscious and intelligent transformation of his environment which is peculiar to the peculiar intelligence and creative faculty of man we call the production of wealth. Wealth is a matter which has been consciously and intelligently transformed from a condition in which it is less to a condition in which it is more serviceable to a human need. Without wealth, man cannot exist. The production of it is a necessity to him and though it proceeds from the more to the less necessary and even to those forms of production which we call luxuries yet in any given human society there is a certain fund and a certain amount of wealth without which human life cannot be lived. As for instance, in England today certain forms of cooked and elaborately prepared food, clothing, warmth and habitation. Therefore to control the production of wealth is to control human life itself. To refuse man the opportunity for the production of wealth is to refuse him the opportunity for life and in general the way in which the production of wealth is by law permitted is the only way in which citizens can legally exist. The survival state. Wealth can only be produced by the application of human energy, mental and physical to the forces of nature around us and to the material which those forces inform. This human energy so applicable to the material world and its forces we will call labour. As for that material and those natural forces we will call them for the sake of shortness by the narrow but conventionally accepted term land. It would seem therefore that all problems connected with the production of wealth and all discussion there upon involve but two principal original factors to it labour and land. But it so happens that the conscious, artificial and intelligent action of man upon nature corresponding to his peculiar character compared with other created beings introduces a third factor of the utmost importance. Man proceeds to create wealth by ingenious methods of varying and often increasing complexity and aids himself by the construction of implements. These soon become in each new department of the production truly necessary to that production as labour and land. Further, any process of production takes a certain time. During that time the producer must be fed and clothed and housed and the rest of it. There must therefore be an accumulation of wealth created in the past and reserved with the object of maintaining labour during its efforts to produce for the future. Whether it be the making of an instrument or tool or the setting aside of a store of provisions, labour applied to land for either purpose is not producing wealth for immediate consumption. It is setting aside and reserving somewhat and that somewhat is always necessary in varying proportions according to the simplicity or complexity of the economic society to the production of wealth. Two such wealth reserved and set aside for the purposes of future production and not for immediate consumption whether it be in the form of instruments and tools or in the form of stores for the maintenance of labour during the process of production, we give the name of capital. There are thus three factors in the production of all human wealth which we may conventionally term land, capital and labour. When we talk of the means of production we identify land and capital combined. Thus when we say that a man is dispossessed of the means of production or cannot produce wealth saved by the leave of another who possesses the means of production, we mean that he is the master only of his labour and has no control in any useful amount over either capital or land or both combined. He is politically free, that is, one who enjoys the right before the law to exercise his energies when he pleases or not at all if he does not so, please, but not possessed by legal right of control over any useful amount of the means of production, we call proletarian. And any considerable class composed of such men we call a proletariat. Property is a term used for that arrangement in society whereby the control of land and wealth made from land including therefore all the means of production is vested in some person or corporation. Thus we may say of a building including the land upon which it stands that it is the property of such and such a citizen or family or college or of the state meaning that those who own such property are guaranteed by the law the right to use it or withhold it from use. Private property signifies such wealth including the means of production as may by the arrangements of society be in the control of persons or corporations other than political bodies of which these persons or corporations are in another aspect members. What distinguishes private property is not that the possessor thereof is less than the state or is only part of the state for were that so we should talk of municipal property as private property. But rather that the owner may exercise his control over it to his own advantage and not as a trustee for society nor in the hierarchy of political institutions. Thus Mr. Jones is a citizen of Manchester but he does not own his private property as a citizen of Manchester. He owns it as Mr. Jones whereas if the house next to his own be owned by the Manchester municipality they own it only because they are a political body standing for the whole community of the town. Mr. Jones might move to Glasgow and still own his property in Manchester but the municipality of Manchester can only own its property in connection with the corporate political life of the town. An ideal society in which the means of production should be in the hands of the political officers of the community we call collectivist or more generally socialist. A society in which private property in land and capital that is the ownership and therefore the control of the means of production is confined to some number of free citizens not large enough to determine the social mass of the state while the rest have not such property and are therefore proletarian we call capitalist and the method by which wealth is produced in such a society can only be the application of labour the determining mass of which must necessarily be proletarian to land and capital in such fashion that of the total wealth produced proletariat which labour shall only receive a portion the two marks then defining the capitalist state Save in this special sense of collectivist the word socialist has either no clear meaning or is used synonymously with other older and better known words are that the citizen thereof are politically free can use or withhold at will their positions or their labour are also divided into capitalist and proletarian in such proportions that the state as a whole is not characterised by the institution of ownership among free citizens but by the restriction of ownership to a section markedly less than the whole or even to a small minority such a capitalist state is essentially divided into two classes of free citizens the one capitalist or owning or property-less or proletarian my last definition concerns the survival state itself and since the idea is both somewhat novel and also the subject of this book I will not only establish but expand its definition the definition of the survival state is as follows that arrangement of society in which so considerable a number of the families and individuals are constrained by a positive law to labour for the advantage of other families and individuals as to stamp the whole community with a mark of such labour we call the survival state note first certain negative limitations in the above which must be clearly seized if we are not to lose clear thinking in a fog of metaphor and rhetoric that society is not survival in which men are intelligently constrained to labour by enthusiasm by a religious tenant or indirect from a fear of destitution or directly from love of gain or from the common sense which teaches them that by their labour they may increase their well-being a clear boundary exists between the survival and the non-survival condition of labour and the conditions upon either side of that boundary utterly differ from one another where there is compulsion applicable by a positive law to men of a certain status such compulsion enforced in the last resort by the powers at the disposal of the state there is the institution of slavery and if that institution be sufficiently expanded the whole state may be said to propose upon a survival basis and is a survival state where such formal legal status is absent the conditions are not survival and the difference between servitude and freedom appreciable in a thousand details of actual life is most glaring in this that the free man can refuse his labour and use that refusal as an instrument wherewith to bargain while the slave has no such instrument or power to bargain at all but is dependent for his well-being upon the custom of society backed by the regulation of such of its laws as may protect and guarantee the slave next let it be observed that the state is not servile because the mere institution of slavery is to be discovered somewhere within its confines the state is only servile when so considerable a body is affected by the compulsion of positive law as to give a character to the whole community similarly that state is not servile in which all citizens are liable to submit their energies to the compulsion of positive law and must labour at the discretion of state officials by loose metaphor and for rhetorical purposes men who dislike collectivism for instance or the discipline will talk of the servile conditions of such organizations but for the purposes of strict definition and clear thinking it is essential to remember that a servile condition only exists by contrast with the free condition the servile condition is present in a society only when there is also present the free citizen for whose benefit the slave works under the compulsion of positive law again it should be noted that this word servile in no way connotates the worst nor even necessarily a bad arrangement of society this point is so clear that it should hardly delay us but a confusion between the rhetorical and the precise use of the word servile I have discovered to embarrass public discussion of the matter so much that I must once more emphasize what should be self evident the discussion as to whether the institution of slavery be a good or be relatively better or worse than the other alternative institutions has nothing whatever to do with the exact definition of that institution thus monarchy consists in throwing the responsibility for the direction of society upon an individual one can imagine some roman of the first century praising the new imperial power but through a muddle headed tradition against kings swearing that he would never tolerate a monarchy such a fellow would have been a very futile critic of public affairs under attrition but no more futile than a man who swears that nothing shall make him a slave though well prepared to accept laws that compel him to labor without his consent under the force of public law and upon terms dictated by others many would argue that a man so lever guaranteed against insecurity and against insufficiency of food housing and clothing promised subsistence for his old age and a similar set of advantages for his posterity would be a great deal better off than a free man lacking all these things but the argument does not affect the definition attaching to the word survival a devout Christian of blameless life drifting upon an ice flow in the arctic night without food or any prospect of succor is not so comfortably circumstance as a cadet of Egypt but it would be folly in establishing the definition of the word Christians and Mohammedan to bring this contrast into account we must then throughout this inquiry keep strictly to the economic aspect of the case only when that is established and when the modern tendency to the reestablishment of slavery is clear are we free to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the revolution through which we are passing and of section 2 this is a LibraVox recording all LibraVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibraVox.org the survival state section 3 it must further be grasped that the essential mark of the survival institution does not depend upon the ownership of the slave by a particular master that the institution of slavery tends to that form under the various forces composing human nature and human society is probable enough that if when slavery were reestablished in England a particular man would in time be found the slave not of capitalism in general but of say the Shell Oil Trust in particular is a very likely development and we know that in societies where the institution was of immemorial antiquity such direct possession of the slave by the free man or corporation of free men had come to be the rule but my point is that such a mark is not essential to the character of slavery as an initial phase in the institution of slavery or even as a permanent phase marking society for an indefinite time it is perfectly easy to conceive of a whole class rendered survival by a positive law and compelled by such law to labor for the advantage of another non-survive free class without any direct act of possession permitted to one man over the person of another the final contrast thus established between slave and free might be maintained by the state guaranteeing to the unfree security in their subsistence to the free security in their property and profits, rent, and interest what would mark the slave in such a society would be his belonging to that set or status which was compelled by no matter what definition to labor and was thus cut off from the other set or status not compelled to labor but free to labor or not as it willed again the survival state would certainly exist even though a man being only compelled to labor during a portion of his time were free to bargain and even to accumulate in his free time the old lawyers used to distinguish between a serf in gross and a serf regarding a serf in gross was one who was a serf at all times and places and not in respect to a particular lord a serf regarding was a serf only in his bondage to serve a particular lord he was free as against other men and one might perfectly well have slaves who were only slaves regarding to a particular type of employment during particular hours but they would be slaves nonetheless and if their hours were many and their class numerous the state which they supported would be a servile state lastly let it be remembered that the servile condition remains as truly an institution of the state when it attaches prominently and irrevocably at any one time to a particular set of human beings as when it attaches to a particular class throughout their lives thus the laws of paganism permitted the slave to be enfranchised by his master it further permitted children or prisoners to be sold into slavery the servile institution though perpetually changing in the elements of its composition was still an unchanging factor in the state similarly though the state should only subject to slavery those who had less than a certain income while leaving men free by inheritance or otherwise to pass out of and by loss to pass into the slave class that slave class though fluctuating as to its composition would still permanently exist thus if the modern industrial state shall make a law by which servile conditions shall not attach to those capable of earning more than a certain sum by their own labor but shall attach to those who earn less than this sum or if the modern industrial state defines manual labor in a particular fashion renders it compulsory during a fixed time for those who undertake it but leaves them free to turn later to other occupations if they choose undoubtedly such distinctions though they attach to conditions and not to individuals establish the servile institution some considerable number must be manual workers by definition and while they were so defined would be slaves here again the composition of the servile class would fluctuate but the class would be permanent and large enough to stamp all society I need not insist upon the practical effect that such a class once established tends to be fixed in the great majority of those which make it up and that the individuals entering or leaving it tend to become few compared to the whole mass there is one last point to be considered in this definition it is this since in the nature of things a free society must enforce a contract a free society consisting in nothing else but the enforcement of free contracts how far can that be called a servile condition which is the result of contract nominally or really free in other words is not a contract to labor however freely entered into servile of its nature when enforced by the state for instance I have no food or clothing nor do I possess the means of production whereby I can produce any wealth in exchange for such I am so circumstance that an owner of the means of production will not allow me to access those means unless I sign a contract to serve him for a week at a wage of bare subsistence does the state in enforcing that contract make me for that weak a slave obviously not for the institution of slavery presupposes a certain attitude of mind in the free man and in the slave a habit of living in either and the stamp of both those habits upon society no such effects are produced a contract enforceable by the length of one week the duration of human life is such and the prospects of posterity that the fulfilling of such a contract in no way wounds the sense of liberty and of choice what of a month a year ten years a lifetime suppose an extreme case and a destitute man to sign a contract binding him and all his children who were minors would work for a bare subsistence until his own death or the attainment of majority of the children whichever event might happen latest would the state in enforcing that contract be making the man a slave as undoubtedly as it would not be making him a slave in the first case it would be making him a slave in the second one can only say to ancient sophisticated difficulties of this kind and establishes for itself the true limits of any object as a freedom what freedom is or is not in so far as mere measure of time is concerned though of course much else than time enters in human habit determines but the enforcing of a contract of service certainly or probably leaving a choice after its expiration is consonant with freedom the enforcement of a contract probably binding one's whole life is not consonant with freedom one binding to service a man's natural heirs is intolerable to freedom consider another converse point a man binds himself to work for life and his children after him so far as the law may permit him to bind them in a particular society but that not for bare subsistence but for so large a way that he will be wealthy in a few years and his posterity when the contract is completed wealthier still does the state enforcing such a contract make the fortunate employee a slave no for it is in the essence of slavery that subsistence or little more than subsistence should be guaranteed to the slave slavery exists in order that the free should benefit by its existence and can also condition in which the men subjected to it may demand secure existence but little more if anyone were to draw an exact line and say that a life contract and forcible by law was slavery at so many shillings a week but cease to be slavery after that margin his effort would be folly nonetheless there is a standard of subsistence in every society the guarantee of which or little more under an obligation to labor by compulsion is slavery while the guarantee of very much more is not slavery this verbal jugglery might be continued it is a type of verbal difficulty apparent in every inquiry open to the professional disputant but of no effect upon the mind of the honest inquirer it is always possible by establishing a cross section in a set of definitions to pose the unanswerable difficulty of degree but that will never affect the realities of the discussion we know for instance what is meant by torture when it exists in a code of laws and when it is forbidden no imaginary difficulties of degree between pulling a man's hair and scalping him and burning him alive will disturb a reformer whose business it is to expunge torture from some penal code in the same way we know what is and what is not compulsory labor what is and what is not the survival condition its test is, I repeat the withdrawal from a man of his free choice to labor or not to labor here or there for such and such an object from my positive law to labor for the advantage of others who do not fall under the same compulsion where you have that you have slavery with all the manifold spiritual and political results of that ancient institution where you have slavery affecting a class of such considerable size as to mark and determine the character of the state there you have the survival state to sum up then the survival state is that in which we find so considerable a body of families and individuals distinguished from free citizens by the mark of compulsory labor as to stamp a general character upon society and all the chief characters, good or evil attaching to the institution of slavery will be found permeating such a state whether the slaves be directly and personally attached to their masters being directly attached to the medium of the state or attached in a third manner through their subservience to corporations or to particular industries the slaves so compelled to labor will be one dispossessed of the means of production and compelled by law to labor for the advantage of all or any who are possessed thereof and the distinguishing mark of the slave proceeds from the special action which first separates one body of men the less free from another the more free in the function of contract within the general body of the community now from a purely survival conception of production and of the arrangement of society we Europeans sprang the immemorial past of Europe is the survival past during some centuries which the church raised permeated and constructed Europe was gradually released or divorced from this immemorial and fundamental conception of slavery to that conception to that institution our industrial or capitalist society is now upon its return we are re-establishing the slave before proceeding to the proof of this I shall in the next few pages digress to sketch very briefly the process whereby the old pagan slavery was transformed into a free society some centuries ago I shall then outline the further process whereby the new non-survile society was wrecked at the reformation in certain areas of Europe and particularly in England there was gradually produced in its stead the transitory phase of society now nearing its end called generally capitalism or the capitalist state such a digression being purely historical is not logically necessary to a consideration of our subject but it is of great value to the reader because the knowledge of how in reality and in the concrete things have moved better enables us to understand the logical process whereby they tend towards a particular goal in the future one could prove the tendency towards the survival state in England today to a man who knew nothing of the past of Europe but that tendency will seem to him far more reasonably probable far more a matter of experience and less a matter of mere deduction when he knows what our society once was and how it changed into what we know today the end of section 3 this is a Libravox recording all Libravox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit Libravox.org the survival state by Hilaire Belock section 4 section 2 our civilization was originally survival in no matter what field of the European past we make our research we find from 2000 years ago upwards one fundamental institution whereupon the whole of society reposes that fundamental institution is slavery there is no distinction here between the highly civilized city-state of the Mediterranean with its letters its plastic art and its coat of laws with all that makes civilization and this stretching back far beyond any surviving record where is here no distinction between that civilized body and the northern and western societies of the Celtic tribes or of the little known hordes that wandered in the Germanics and differently reposed upon slavery it was a fundamental conception of society it was everywhere present nowhere disputed there is a distinction or would appear to be between Europeans and Asiatics in this matter the religion and morals of the ones so different in their very origin from those of the other that every social institution was touched by the contrast and slavery among the rest but with that we need not concern ourselves my point is that our European ancestry those men from whom we are descended and whose blood runs with little admixture in our veins took slavery for granted made of it the economic pivot upon which the production of wealth should turn we were doubted but that it was normal to all human society it is a matter of capital importance to seize this an arrangement of such a sword would not have endured without intermission and indeed without question for many centuries nor have been found emerging fully grown from that vast space of unrecorded time during which barbarism and civilization flourished side by side in Europe from the good or evil native to our blood there was no question in those ancient societies from which we spring of making subject races into slaves by the might of conquering races all that is the guesswork of the universities not only is there no proof of it rather all the existing proof is the other way the greek had a greek slave the latin the german the kelt the theory that superior races invaded a land either drove out the original inhabitants or reduced them to slavery is one which has no argument either from our present knowledge of man's mind or from recorded evidence indeed the most striking feature of that survival basis upon which paganism reposed was the human equality recognized between master and slave the master might kill the slave but both were of one race and each was human to the other this spiritual value was not as a further pernicious piece of guesswork would dream a growth or a progress the doctrine of human equality was inherent in the very stuff of antiquity as it is inherent in those societies that have not lost tradition we may presume that the barbarian of the north would grasp the great truth with less facility than the civilized man of the Mediterranean because barbarism everywhere shows a retrogression in intellectual power but the proof that the survival institution was a social arrangement rather than a distinction of type is patent from the coincidence everywhere of emancipation with slavery in Europe not only thought the existence of slaves a natural necessity to society but equally thought that upon giving a slave his freedom the enfranchised man would naturally step through perhaps after the interval of some lineage into the ranks of free society great poets and great artists statesmen and soldiers were little troubled by the memory of a survival ancestry on the other hand there was a perpetual emancipation of the survival institution just as there was a perpetual emancipation from it proceeding year after year and the natural or normal method of recruitment is most clearly apparent to us in the simple and barbaric societies which the observation of contemporary civilized pagans enables us to judge it was poverty that made the slave prisoners of war taken in sec combat afforded one mode of recruitment and there was also the rating of men by pirates in the outer lands and the selling of them in the slave markets of the south but at once the cause of the recruitment and the permanent support of the institution of slavery was the indigence of the man who sold himself into slavery or was born into it for it was a rule of pagan slavery that the slave bred the slave and that even if one of the parents were free the offspring was a slave the society of antiquity therefore was normally divided as must at last be society of any survival state into clearly marked sections there was upon the one hand the citizen who had a voice in the conduct of the state who would often labor but labor of his own free will and who was normally possessed of property upon the other hand there was a mass dispossessed of the means of production and compelled by positive law to labor at command it is true that in the further developments of society the accumulation of private savings by a slave was tolerated and that slave so favored did sometimes purchase their freedom it is a further truth that in the confusion of the last generations of paganism there arose in some of the great cities a considerable class of men although free were dispossessed of the means of production but these last never existed in a sufficient proportion to stamp the whole state of society with a character drawn from their proletarian circumstance to the end the pagan world remained a world of free proprietors possessed in various degrees of the land and of the capital whereby wealth may be produced and applying to that land and capital for the purpose of producing wealth compulsory labor certain features in that original survival state from which we all spring should be carefully noted by way of conclusion first though all nowadays contrast slavery with freedom to the advantage of the latter yet men then accept this slavery freely as an alternative to indigents secondly and this is most important for our judgment the survival institution as a whole and of the chances of its return in all those centuries we find no organized effort nor what is still more significant do we find any complaint of conscience against the institution which condemned the bulk of human beings to forced labor slaves may be found in the literary exercises of the time bewailing their lot and joking about it some philosophers will complain that an ideal society should contain no slaves others will excuse the establishment of slavery upon this plea or that while granting that it offends the dignity of man the greater part will argue of the state that it is necessarily survival but no one slave or free dreams of abolishing or even of changing the thing you have no martyrs for the case of freedom has against slavery the so-called survival wars are the resistance on the part of escaped slaves to any attempt at recapture but they are not accompanied by an accepted affirmation that servitude is an intolerable thing nor is that note struck at all from the unknown beginnings to the Catholic endings of the pagan world slavery is irksome undignified woeful is to them of the nature of things you may say to be brief that this arrangement of society was the very air which the pagan antiquity breathed its great works, its leisure and its domestic life, its humor its reserves of power all depended upon the fact that its society was that of the survival state men were happy in that arrangement or at least as happy as men ever are they escaped by a personal effort whether of thrift, of adventure or a flattery to a master from the servile condition had never even so much of driving power behind it as the attempt many show today to escape from the rank of wage earners to those of employers servitude did not seem a hell into which man would rather die than sink or out of which at any sacrifice whatsoever a man would raise himself it was a condition accepted by those who suffered it as much as by those who enjoyed it and a perfectly necessary part of all that men did and thought you find no barbarism from some free place astonished at the institution of slavery you find no slave pointing to a society in which slavery was unknown as towards a happier land to our ancestors not only for those few centuries during which we have a record of their actions but apparently during an illimitable past the division of society into those who must work under compulsion and those who would benefit by their labor was the very plan of the state apart from which they could hardly think of society as existing at all let all this be clearly grasped it is fundamental to an understanding of the problem before us slavery is no novel experience in the history of Europe nor is one suffering an odd dream when one talks of slavery as acceptable to European men slavery was of the very stuff of Europe for thousands upon thousands of years until Europe engaged upon that considerable moral experiment called the faith which many believed to be now accomplished and discarded and in the failure of which it would seem that the old and primary institution of slavery must return for there came upon us Europeans after all those centuries and centuries of settled social order which was erected upon slavery as upon a sheer foundation the experiment called the Christian church among the byproducts of this experiment very slowly emerging in the old pagan world and not long completed before Christendom itself suffered a shipwreck was the exceedingly gradual transformation of the survival state into something other a society of owners and how that something other did proceed from the pagan survival state I will next explain section 3 how the survival institution was for a time dissolved the process by which slavery disappeared among Christian men though very lengthy in its development it covered close upon a thousand years and though exceedingly complicated in its detail maybe easily and briefly grasped in its main lines let it first be clearly understood that the vast revolution through which the European mind passed between the first and fourth centuries that revolution which is often termed the conversion of the world to Christianity but which should for purposes of historical accuracy be called the girls of the church included no attack upon the survival institution no dogma of the church pronounced slavery to be immoral or the sale and purchase of men to be a sin or the imposition of compulsory labor upon a Christian to be a contravention of any human right emancipation of slaves was indeed regarded as a good work by the faithful but so was it regarded by the pagan it was on the face of it a service rendered to one's fellow men the sale of Christians to pagan masters was abhorrent to the latter empire of the barbarian invasions not because slavery in itself was condemned but because it was a sort of treason to civilization to force men away from civilization to barbarism in general you will discover no pronouncement against slavery as an institution nor any moral definition attacking it throughout all those early Christian centuries during which it nonetheless effectively disappears the form of its disappearance is well worth noting it begins with the establishment as the fundamental unit of production in western Europe of those great landed estates commonly lying in the hands of a single proprietor and generally known as the Ville there were of course many other forms of human agglomeration small peasant farms owned in absolute proprietorship by their petty masters groups of free men associated in what was called the vicus manufacturers in which groups of slaves were industrially organized to the profit of their master and governing the regions around them the scheme of roman towns but of all these was the dominating type and as society passed from the high civilization of the first four centuries into the simplicity of the dark ages the villa the unit of agricultural production became more and more the model of all society now the villa began as a considerable extent of land containing like a modern English estate pasture, arable water, wood and heath or wasteland it was owned by an absolute proprietorship to sell or leave by will to do with it whatever he chose it was cultivated for him by slaves to whom he owed nothing in return and whom it was simply his interest to keep alive and to continue breeding in order that they might perpetuate his wealth the end of section four this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org The Survile State by Hilaire Bellock section five I concentrate particularly upon these slaves the great majority of the human beings inhabiting the land because although there arose in the dark ages when the roman empire was passing into the society of the middle ages other social elements within the villa the freed men who owed the lord a modified service and even occasionally independent citizens present through a contract terminable and freely entered into yet it is the slave who is the mark of all that society at its origin then the roman villa was a piece of absolute property the production of wealth upon which was due to the application of labor to the natural resources of the place and that slave labor was as much the property of the lord as was the land itself the first modification which this arrangement showed in the new society which accompanied the growth and establishment of the church in the roman world was a sort of customary rule which modified the old arbitrary position of the slave the slave was still a slave but it was both more convenient in the decay of communications and public power and more consonant with the social spirit of the time to make sure of that slave's produce by asking him for no more than certain customary dues the slave and his descendants became more or less rooted to one spot some were still bought and sold but in decreasing numbers as the generations passed a larger and larger proportion lived where and as their fathers had lived and the produce which they raised was fixed more and more at a certain amount which the lord was content to receive and asked no more the arrangement was made workable by leaving to the slave all the remaining produce of his own labor there was a sort of implied bargain here in the absence of public powers and in the decline of the old highly centralized and vigorous system which could always guarantee to the master the full product of the slave's effort the bargain implied was that if the slave community of the villa would produce for the benefit of its lord not less than a certain customary amount of goods from the soil of the villa the lord could count on their always exercising that effort by leaving to them all the surplus which they could increase if they willed indefinitely by the ninth century when this process had been gradually at work for a matter of some three hundred years one fixed form of productive unit began to be apparent throughout western christendom the old absolutely owned estate had come to be divided into three portions one of these was pasture and arable land reserved privately to the lord and called domain that is the lord's land another was in the occupation and already almost in the possession practically though not legally of those who had once been slaves a third was common land owned over which both the lord and the slave exercised each their various rights which rights were minutely remembered and held sacred by custom for instance in a certain village if there was a beach pasture for three hundred swine the lord might put in but fifty two hundred and fifty were the rights of the village upon the first of these portions domain wealth was produced by the obedience of the slave for certain fixed hours of labor he must come so many days a week or upon such and such occasions all fixed and customary to till the land of the domain for his lord and all the produce of this must be handed over to the lord though of course a daily wage in kind was allowed for the laborer must live upon the second portion land in villainage which was nearly always the most of the arable and pasture land of the villain the slaves worked by rules and customs which they gradually came to elaborate for themselves they worked under an officer of their own sometimes nominated sometimes elected nearly always in practice a man suitable to them and more or less of their choice though this cooperative work upon the old slave ground was controlled by the general customs of the village common to the lord and slave alike and the principal officer over both kinds of land was the lord steward of the wealth so produced by the slaves a certain fixed portion estimated originally in kind was payable to the lord's bailiff and became the property of the lord finally on the third division of the land the waste the wood the heath and certain common pastures wealth was produced as elsewhere by the laborer of those who had once been the slaves but divided in customary proportions between them and their master thus such and such a water meadow would have grazing for so many oxen the number was rigidly defined and of that number so many would be the lord's and so many the villagers during the eighth ninth and tenth centuries this system crystallized and became so natural in men's eyes that the original survival character of the working folk upon the villa was forgotten the documents of the time are rare these three centuries are the crucible of Europe and record is drowned and burnt in them our study of the social conditions especially in the latter part are the matter rather of inference than of direct evidence but the sale and purchase of men already exceptional at the beginning of this period is almost unknown before the end of it apart from domestic slaves within the household slavery in the old sense which pagan antiquity gave that institution had been transformed out of all knowledge and when with the eleventh century the true middle ages began to spring from the soil of the dark ages and the new civilization to arise though the old word service the Latin for a slave is still used for the man who works the soil his status in the now increasing number of documents which we can consult is wholly changed certainly no longer translate the word by the English word slave we are compelled to translate it by a new word with very different connotations the word surf the surf of the early middle ages of the eleventh and early twelve centuries of the crusades and the Norman conquest is already nearly a peasant he is indeed bound in legal theory to the soil upon which he was born in social practice all that is required for him is that his family should till its quota of servile land and that the dues to the lord shall not fail from absence of labor that duty fulfilled it is easy and common for members of the surf class to enter the professions and the church or to go wild to become men practically free in the growing industries of the towns with every passing generation the ancient servile concept of the labor status grows more and more dim and the courts and the practice of society treat him more and more as a man strictly bound to certain dues and to certain periodical labor within his industrial unit but in all other respects free as the civilization of the middle ages develops as wealth increases and the arts progressively flourish this character of freedom becomes more marked in spite of attempts in time of scarcity as after a plague to insist upon the old rights to compulsory labor the habit of commuting these rights for money payments and dues has grown too strong to be resisted if at the end of the 14th century let us say or at the beginning of the 15th you had visited some squire upon his estate in France or in England he would have told you the whole of it these are my lands but the peasant as he was now would have said also of his holding this is my land he could not be evicted from it the dues which he was customarily bound to pay were but a fraction of its total produce he could not always sell it but it was always inheritable from father to son and in general at the close of this long process of a thousand years the slave had become a free man for all ordinary purposes of society he bought and sold he saved as he willed he invested, he built he drained at his discretion and if he improved the land it was to his own profit meanwhile side by side with this emancipation of mankind in the direct line of descent from the old chattel slaves of the roman villa went in the middle ages a crowd of institutions which all similarly made for a distribution of property and for the destruction of even the fossil remnants of a then forgotten servile state thus the industry of every kind in the towns in transport, in crafts and in commerce was organized in the form of guilds and a guild was a society particularly cooperative but in the main composed of private owners of capital whose corporation was self-governing and was designed to check competition between its members to prevent the growth of one at the expense of the other above all most jealously did the guild safeguard the division of property so that there should be forms within its ranks no proletariat upon the one side and no monopolizing capitalist on the other there was a period of apprenticeship at a man's entry into a guild which he worked for a master but in time he became a master in his turn the existence of such corporations as the normal units of industrial production of commercial effort and of the means of transport is proof enough of what the social spirit was which had also enfranchised the laborer upon the land and while such institutions flourished side by side with the no longer servile village communities freehold or absolute possession of the soil has distinguished from the tenure of the serf under the lord also increased these three forms under which labor was exercised the serf secure in his position and burdened only with regular dues which were but a fraction of his produce the freeholder a man independent say for money dues which were more of a tax than a rent for a household in which well divided capital worked cooperatively for craft production for the transport and for the commerce of all three between them were making a society which should be based upon the principle of property all or most the normal family should own and on ownership the freedom of the state should repose the state as the minds of men envisioned at the close of this process was an agglomeration of families of varying wealth but by far the greater number owners of the means of production it was an agglomeration in which the stability of this distributive system as I have called it was guaranteed by the existence of cooperative bodies binding men of the same craft or of the same village together guaranteeing the small proprietor against loss of his economic independence at the same time it guaranteed society against the growth of a proletariat if liberty of purchase and of sale of mortgage and of inheritance was restricted it was restricted with the social object of preventing the growth of an economic oligarchy which could exploit the rest of the community the restraints upon liberty were restraints designed for the preservation of liberty and every action of medieval society from the flower of the middle ages to the approach of their catastrophe was directed towards the establishment of a state in which men should be economically free through the possession of capital and of land save here and there in legal formula or in rare patches isolated and eccentric the survival institution had totally disappeared nor must it be imagined that anything in the nature of collectivism had replaced it there was common land jealously guarded by men who are also personal proprietors of other land common property in the village was but one of the forms of property and was used rather as the flywheel to preserve the regularity of the cooperative machine than as a type of holding in any way peculiarly sacred the guilds had property in common but that property was the property necessary to their cooperative life such was their funds for relief their religious endowments as for instruments of their trades those instruments were owned by the individual members not by the guild save where they were of so expensive a kind as to necessitate a corporate control such was the transformation which had come over European society in the course of ten Christian centuries slavery had gone and in this place had come that establishment of civilization which seemed so normal to men and so consonant to a happy human life no particular name was then found for it today and now that it has disappeared we must construct an awkward one and say that the middle ages had instinctively conceived and brought into existence the distributive state the end of section 5 this is a Libravox recording all Libravox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit Libravox.org The Survile State by Hilaer Bellach section 6 that excellent consummation of human society passed as we know and was in certain provinces of Europe but more particularly in Britain destroyed for a society in which the determinant massive families were owners of capital and of land for one in which production was regulated by self-governing corporations of small owners and for one in which the misery and insecurity of a proletariat was unknown there came to be substituted the dreadful moral anarchy against which all moral effort is now turned and which goes by the name of capitalism how did such a catastrophe come about why was it permitted and upon what historical process did the evil baton what turned an England economically free into the England which we know today of which at least one third is indigent of which nineteen twentieths are dispossessed of capital and of land and of which the whole industry and national life is controlled upon its economic side by a few chance directors of millions of masters of unsocial and irresponsible monopolies the answer most usually given to this fundamental question in our history and the one most readily accepted is that this misfortune came about through a material process known as the industrial revolution the use of expensive machinery the concentration of industry and of its implements are imagined to have enslaved in some blind way apart from the human will the action of English mankind the explanation is holy false no such material cause determined the degradation from which we suffer it was the deliberate action of men evil will in a few and apathy of will among the many which produced a catastrophe as human in its causes and its inception as in its vile effect capitalism was not the growth of the industrial movement nor of chance material discoveries a little acquaintance with history and a little straightforwardness in the teaching of it would be enough to prove that the industrial system was a growth proceeding from capitalism not its cause capitalism was here in England before the industrial system came into being before the use of coal and of the new expensive machinery and of the concentration of the implements of production in the great towns had capitalism not been present before the industrial revolution that revolution might have proved as beneficent to Englishman as it has proved maleficent but capitalism that is the ownership by a few of the springs of life was present long before the great discoveries came it warped the effect of these discoveries and new inventions and it turned them from a good into an evil thing it was not machinery that lost us our freedom it was the loss of a free mind section 4 how the distributive state failed with the close of the middle ages the societies of western Christendom and England among the rest were economically free property was an institution native to the state and enjoyed by the great mass of its citizens cooperative institutions voluntary regulations of labor restricted the completely independent use of property by its owners only in order to keep that institution intact and to prevent the absorption of small property by great this excellent state of affairs which we had reached after many centuries of Christian development and in which the old institution of slavery had been finally eliminated from Christendom did not everywhere survive in England in particular it was ruined the seeds of the disaster were sown in the 16th century its first apparent effects came to light in the 17th during the 18th century England came to be finally though insecurely established upon a proletarian basis that is it had already become a society of rich men possessed of the means of production on the one hand and a majority dispossessed of those means upon the other with the 19th century the evil plant had come to its maturity and England had come before the close of that period a purely capitalist state the type and model of capitalism for the whole world with the means of production tightly held by a very small group of citizens and the whole determining mass of the nation dispossessed of capital and land and dispossessed therefore in all cases of security and in many of sufficiency as well the mass of English men still possessed of political lacked more and more the elements of economic freedom and were in a worse posture than free citizens have ever found themselves before in the history of Europe by what steps did so enormous a catastrophe fall upon us the first step in the process consisted in the mishandling of a great economic revolution which marked the 16th century the lands and the accumulated wealth of the monasteries were taken out of the hands of their old possessors with the intention of vesting them in the crown but they passed, as a fact not into the hands of the crown but into the hands of an already wealthy section of the community who, after the change was complete became in the succeeding hundred years the governing power of England this is what happened the England of the early 16th century the England over which Henry VIII inherited his powerful crown in youth though it was in England in which the great mass of men owned the land they tilled and the houses they dwelled and the implements with which they worked was yet in England in which these goods though widely distributed were distributed unequally then as now the soil and its fixtures were the basis of all wealth but the proportion between the value of the soil and its fixtures and the value of other means of production implements stores of clothing and of subsistence, etc was different from what it is now the land and the fixtures upon it formed a very much larger fraction of the totality of the means of production than they do today they represent today not one half the total means of production of this country and though they are the necessary foundation for all wealth production yet our great machines our stores of food and clothing our coal and oil our ships and the rest of it come to more than the true value of the land and of the fixtures upon the land they come to more than the arable soil and the pasture the constructional value of the houses wharves and docks and so forth in the early 16th century the land and the fixtures upon it came upon the contrary to very much more than all the other forms of wealth combined now this form of wealth was here more than in any other western European country already in the hands of a wealthy landowning class at the end of the middle ages it is impossible to give exact statistics because none were gathered and we can only make general statements based upon inference and research but roughly speaking we may say that the total value of the land and its fixtures probably rather more than a quarter though less than a third was in the hands of this wealthy class the England of that day was mainly agricultural and consisted of more than four six million people and in every agricultural community you would have the Lord as he was legally called the squire as he was already conversationally termed the possession of more land than in any other country on the average you found him I say owning in his absolute fashion rather more than a quarter perhaps a third of the land of the village in the towns the distribution was more even sometimes it was the individual who was in this position sometimes a corporation but in every village you would have found this land absolutely owned by political head of the village occupying a considerable portion of its acreage the rest though distributed as property among the less fortunate of the population and carrying with it houses and implements from which they could not be dispossessed paid certain dues to the Lord and what was more the Lord exercised local justice this class of wealthy landowners had been also now for one hundred years the justices upon whom local administration depended the distributive failed there was no reason why this state of affairs should not gradually have led to the rise of the peasant and the decay of the Lord that is what happened in France and it might perfectly well have happened here a peasantry eager to purchase might have gradually extended their holdings at the expense of the land and to the distributive property which was already fairly complete there might have been added another excellent element namely the more equal possession of that property but any such process of gradual buying by the small man from the great as such would seem natural to the temper of us European people and such has since taken place nearly everywhere in countries which were left free to act upon their popular instincts was interrupted in this country by an artificial revolution of the most violent kind this artificial revolution consisted in the seizing of the monastic lands by the crown it is important to grasp clearly the nature of this operation for the whole economic future of England was to flow from it of the lands and the power of local administration which they carried with them a very important feature as we shall see later rather more than a quarter were in the hands of the church the church was therefore the lord of something over 25% say 28% or perhaps nearly 30% of English agricultural communities and the overseers of a like proportion of all English agricultural produce the church was further the absolute owner in practice of something like 30% of the lands in the villages and the receiver of something like 30% of the customary dues paid by the small owners to the greater all this economic power lay until 1535 in the hands of the cathedral chapters communities of monks and nuns educational establishments conducted by the clergy and so forth when the monastic lands were confiscated by Henry VIII not the whole of the fast was suddenly extinguished the secular clergy remained in doubt and most of the educational establishments though looted retained some revenue but though the whole 30% did not suffer confiscation something well over 20% did and the revolution affected by this vast operation was by far the most complete the most sudden and the most momentous of any that has taken place in the economic history of any European people it was at first intended to retain this great mass of the means of production in the hands of the crown that must be clearly remembered by any student of the fortunes of England and by all who marvel at the contrast between the old England and the new had that intention been firmly maintained the English state and its government would have been the most powerful in Europe the executive which in those days meant the king would have had a greater opportunity for crushing the resistance of the wealthy for backing its political power with economic power and for ordering the social life of its subjects than any other executive in Christendom had Henry VIII and his successors kept the land thus confiscated the power of the French monarchy at which we are astonished would have been nothing to the power of the English the king of England would have had in his own hands an instrument of control of the most absolute sort he would presumably have used it as a strong central government always does for the weakening of the wealthier classes and to the indirect advantage of the mass of the people at any rate it would have been a very different England indeed from the England we know if the king had held fast to his own after the dissolution of the monasteries now it is precisely here that the capital point in this great revolution appears the king failed to keep the lands he had seized that class of large landowners which already existed and controlled as I have said anything from a quarter to a third of the agricultural values of England were too strong for the monarchy they insisted upon land being granted to themselves sometimes freely sometimes for ridiculously small sums and they were strong enough in Parliament and through the local administrative power they had to see that their demands were satisfied nothing that the crown let go ever went back to the crown and year after year more and more of what had once been the monastic land became the absolute possession of the large landowners end of section 6 this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org The Survile State by Hilaire Bellock section 7 observe the effect of all this all over England men who already held in virtually absolute property from one quarter to one third of the soil and the plows and the barns of a village became possessed in a very few years in a further great section of the means of production which turned the scale wholly in their favor they added to that third a new and extra fifth they became at a blow the owners of half the land in many centers of capital importance they owned more than half the land they were in many districts not only the unquestioned superiors but the economic masters of the rest of the community they could buy to the greatest advantage they were strictly competitive getting every shilling of due and of rent where the old clerical landlords had been customary leaving much to the tenant they began to fill the universities the judiciary the crown less and less decided between great and small more and more the great could decide in their own favor they soon possessed by these operations the bulk of the means of production and they immediately began the process of eating up the small independent men and gradually forming those greatest states which in the course of a few generations became identical with the village itself all over England you may notice that the greater houses date from this revolution or after it the manorial house the house of the local great man as it was in the middle ages survives here and there to show of what immense effect this revolution was the low timbered place with its steadings and outbuildings only a larger farmhouse among the other farmhouses is turned after the reformation and then forward into a palace save where great castles were only held of the crown and not own made an exception the pre-reformation gentry lived as rich men richer than but not the masters of other farmers around them after the reformation there began to arise all over England those great country houses which rapidly became the typical centers of English agricultural life the process was in full swing before Henry died apparently for England he left as his heir a sickly child during the six years of whose reign from 1547 to 1553 the loot went on at an appalling rate when he died and Mary came to the throne it was nearly completed a mass of new families had arisen wealthy out of all proportion to anything which the older England had known and bound by a common interest to the older families which had joined in the grab every single man who sat in parliament for a county required his price for voting the disillusion of the monasteries every single man received it a list of the members of the disillusion parliament is enough to prove this and apart from their power in parliament this class had a hundred other ways of insisting on their will the howards already of some lineage and the Cavendishes the Cecils, the Russells and fifty other new families thus rose upon the ruins of religion and the process went steadily on until about one hundred years after its inception the whole face of England was changed in the place of a powerful crown disposing of revenues far greater than that of any subject you had a crown at its wits end for money and dominated by subjects somewhere its equals in wealth and who could especially through the action of parliament which they now controlled do much what they willed with government in other words by the first third of the 17th century by 1630 the economic revolution was finally accomplished and the new economic reality thrusting itself upon the old traditions of England was a powerful oligarchy of large owners overshadowing and impoverished and dwindled monarchy other causes had contributed to this deplorable result the change in the value of money had hit the crown very hard the peculiar history of the Tudor family their violent passions their lack of resolution and of any continuous policy to some extent the character of Charles I himself and many another subsidiary cause may be quoted but the main fact upon which the whole thing is dependent is the fact that the monastic lands at least a fifth of the wealth of the country had been transferred to the great landowners and that this transference had tipped the scale over entirely in their favor as against the peasantry the diminished and impoverished crown could no longer stand it fought against the new wealth the struggle of the civil wars it was utterly defeated the final settlement was arrived in 1660 you have all the realities of power in the hands of a small powerful class of wealthy men the king still surrounded by the forms and traditions of his old power but in practice a salaried puppet and in that economic world which underlies all political appearances the great dominating note was that a few wealthy families had got hold of the bulk of the means the purchasing power of money fell during this century to about a third of its original standard say would perch under Charles I the necessities which would have purchased under Henry VII nearly all the receipts of the crown were customary most of its expenses were competitive it continued to get but where it was gradually compelled to pay out of production in England while the same families exercised all local administrative power and were more over the judges of higher education the church and the generals they quite overshadowed what was left of central government in the country take as a starting point for what followed the date 1700 by that time more than half of the English were dispossessed of capital and of land not one man in two even if you reckon the very small owners inhabited a house of which he was the secure possessor of land from which he could not be turned off such a proportion may seem to us today a wonderfully free arrangement and certainly if nearly one half of our population were possessed of the means of production we should be in a very different situation from that in which we find ourselves but the point to see is that though the bad business was very far from completion in or about the year 1700 yet by that date England had already become capitalist she had already permitted a vast section of her population to become proletarian and it is this and not the so called industrial revolution a later thing which accounts for the terrible social condition in which we find ourselves today how true this is what I still have to say in this section will prove in an England thus already cursed with very large proletariat class and in England already directed by a dominating capitalist class possessing the means of production there came a great industrial development had that industrial development come upon a people economically free it would have taken a cooperative form coming as it did upon a people which had already largely lost its economic freedom it took at its very origin a capitalist form and this form it has retained expanded and perfected throughout 200 years it was in England that the industrial system arose it was in England that all its traditions and habits were formed and because the England in which it arose was already a capitalist England modern industrialism wherever you see it at work today having spread from England has proceeded upon the capitalist model it was in 1705 that the first practical steam engine New Cummins was set up to work the life of a man elapsed before this invention was made by Watts introduction of the condenser into the great instrument of production which has transformed our industry but in those 60 years all the origins of the industrial system are to be discovered it was just before Watts Patton that Hargreaves spinning Jenny appeared 30 years earlier Abraham Darby of Coldbrook Dale at the end of a long series of experiments which had covered more than a century smelted iron ore successfully with coke not 20 years later King introduced the flying shuttle the first great improvement in the hand loom and in general the period covered by such a life as that of Dr. Johnson born just after New Cummins engine was first set in full blast the great transformation of England a man who as a child could remember the last years of Queen Anne and who lived to the eve of the French Revolution saw passing before his eyes the change which transformed English society and has led it to the expansion and peril in which we see it today what was the characteristic mark of that half century and more why did the new inventions give us the form of society now known and hated under the name of industrial why did the vast increase in the powers of production in population and in accumulation of wealth turn the mass of Englishman into a poverty stricken proletariat cut off the rich from the rest of the nation and developed to the full all the evils which we associate with the capitalist state to that question and answer almost as universal as it is unintelligent has been given that answer is not only unintelligent but false and it will be my business here to show how false it is the answer so provided in innumerable textbooks and taken almost as a commonplace in our universities is that the new methods of production the new machinery the new implements fatally and of themselves developed a capitalist state in which a few should own the means of production the mass should be the proletariat the new instruments it is pointed out were on so vastly greater a scale than the old and they were so much more expensive that the small man could not afford them while the rich man who could afford them ate up by his competition and reduced from the position of small owner to that of a wage earner his insufficiently equipped competitor who still attempted to struggle on with the older and cheaper tools to this we are told the advantages of concentration were added in favor of the larger owner against the small not only were the new instruments expensive almost in proportion to their efficiency but especially after the introduction of steam they were efficient in proportion to their concentration in few places and under the direction of a few men under the effects of such false arguments as these we have been taught to believe that the horrors of the industrial system were a blind and necessary product of material and impersonal forces and that wherever the steam engine the power loom the blast furnace and the rest were introduced there fatally would soon appear a little group of owners exploiting a vast majority of the dispossessed it is astonishing that a statement so unhistorical should have gained so general credence indeed were the main truths of English history taught in our schools and universities today were educated men familiar with the determining and major facts of the national past such follies could never have taken root the vast growth of the proletariat the concentration of ownership into the hands of a few owners and the exploitation of those owners of the mass of the community had no fatal or necessary connection with the discovery of the new and perpetually improving methods of production the evil preceded indirect historical sequence preceded patently and demonstrably from the fact that England the seed plot of the industrial system was already captured by a wealthy oligarchy before the series of great discoveries began considering what way the industrial system developed upon capitalist lines why were a few rich men put with such ease into possession of the new methods why wasn't normal and natural in their eyes and in that of the contemporary society that those who produced the new wealth with the new machinery should be proletarian and dispossessed simply because England upon which the new discoveries had come was already in England owned as to its soil and accumulations of wealth it was already England in which perhaps half the whole population was proletarian and a medium for exploitation ready to hand when any one of the new industries was launched it had to be capitalized that is accumulated wealth from some source or other had to be found which would support labor in the process of production until that process should be complete someone must find the corn and the meat and the housing and the clothing by which should be supported between the extraction of the raw material and the moment when the consumption of the finished article could begin a human agents which dealt with that raw material and turned it into the finished product had property been well distributed protected by cooperative guilds fenced round and supported by custom and by the autonomy of great artisan corporations those accumulations of wealth necessary for the launching of each new method of production and for each new perfection of it would have been discovered in the mass of small owners their corporations their little parcels of wealth combined would have furnished the capitalization required for the new process and men already owners would as one invention succeeded another have increased the total wealth of the community without disturbing the balance of distribution there is no conceivable link in reason or in experience which binds the capitalization of a new process with the idea of a few employing owners and a mass of employed non-owners working at a wage such great discoveries coming in a society like that of the 13th century would have blessed and enriched mankind coming upon the diseased moral conditions of the 18th century in this country they proved a curse the end of section 7