Apparently the French thinkers who laid the train of the Revolution believed that the “natural right” of property was the necessary check upon the natural right of freedom; but they could not foresee the developments of the Industrial Revolution. Otherwise it is questionable whether they would have found the solution of their problem so easy. For it is not open to argument that the presumed sanctity of property rights has, under the conditions created by the Industrial Revolution furnished the foundation of the modern capitalist order and its corollaries. The capitalist owes his power to his possession of property in the shape of industrial plant or of money. Yet it is plain to anyone who analyses the position with any degree of realism that the mere possession of a number of things should no more entitle or enable an individual to lord it over his fellows than an inheritance of blue blood. Nevertheless, in point of cold fact, that is the present position; there is, however, a prospect that the divine right of property may presently go the same way as the divine right of kings.
But it will go not under the pressure of a theory. It will disappear under the strain of economic necessity. In England the proposal of a “levy on capital” has been widely and seriously discussed. It is asserted that it will be impossible to raise by taxation a revenue sufficient to pay the interest on the war debt after providing for indispensable national services; and there appears to be no way out of this impasse save by making a levy upon the accumulated wealth of the country. A levy equal to the debt would require to take something like two-fifths of the estimated total of the private capital. The methods by which this might be done do not now concern us; nor does it matter very much for our argument that the industrial and commercial magnates, and the ancien régime economists are declaiming vehemently against it. Even the fact that the levy may not be carried out in the form now advocated is not of great moment. What is important is that the serious discussion evoked by the proposal has shown that the traditional doctrine of property-rights is in liquidation. There has not been, so far as the present writer has been able to discover, any lifting-up of hands in horror at this suggestion of a sacrilegious invasion upon this ancient sanctity; the discussion has been conducted on the plane of expediency and utility. This marks a very considerable movement—for to many, the Reform Bill of 1831 looked like the end of the world, since it was (as a politician of the time said) “a maxim that every government which tends to separate property from constitutional government must be liable to perpetual revolution.”[3] Property was the chief cornerstone of the social structure; and even as late as 1888, Lord Acton wrote to Mr. Gladstone that he hears that “the skilled artisans of London are hostile to the clergy but not to property,” which latter circumstance he plainly regards as a sign of grace. Yet to-day, under the exigencies of public need, it is seriously discussed whether the state should not lay its hands on anything up to a half of the private wealth of the country.
3. Quoted in Laski, Problems of Sovereignty, p. 70—note.
This is essentially a return to the view of a saner age. The mediæval doctrine was that right in property was not absolute, but that it was of the nature of a trust. This is the view that underlies the project of a levy. Professor Hobhouse draws a distinction between “property for use” and “property for power.” The right to possess property can hardly be denied. It is essential to a man’s freedom and growth that he should have absolute control over a certain number of things. But it should be restricted to what is necessary for personal freedom and growth. A man may have, that is, property for use but not for power. He may not have so much property as would enable him to control or virtually to own the life and labour of others. It is to some such doctrine of property as this that the mind of progressive labour is tending. Property is in prospect of socialisation; and perhaps only such socialised property will in future be available as capital. Under economic pressure, the doctrine of property is being ethicised; and to ethicise the doctrine is simply to declare property to be wholly subordinate to social ends.
The first step in modern democracy was the socialisation of political power; the second without which the first cannot be complete, will be the socialisation of economic power.
III
We should, however, be deluding ourselves if we suppose that radical economic change will of itself bring about the kind of world that we want. The miscarriage which has followed political revolution in the past may no less disastrously follow economic revolution. Economic change is of itself powerless to secure us from the appearance of new types of privilege; and there is not a little danger that the present tendencies of some advanced thought may lead to bureaucratic government. Between a proletarian bureaucracy and an industrial plutocracy there is little to choose; and the tyranny of the expert may become as galling as that of a despot. “In the socialistic presentment,” says Professor Hobhouse, “the expert sometimes looks strangely like the powers that be—in education for instance, a clergyman under a new title, in business that very captain of industry who at the outset was the socialist’s chief enemy. Be that as it may, as the expert comes to the front and efficiency becomes the watchword of administration, all that was human in socialism vanishes out of it. Its tenderness for the losers in the race, its protests against class-tyranny, its revolt against commercial materialism, all the sources of inspiration under which socialist leaders have faced poverty and prison, are gone like a dream and instead of them we have a conception of society as a perfect piece of machinery, pulled by wires radiating from a single centre, and all men are either experts or puppets. Humanity, Liberty, Justice are expunged from the banner and the single word efficiency replaces them.” This is, indeed, a sufficiently dismal prospect, for which it is hardly worth while to change our present state. It should be said, however, that this particular peril is greatly minimised by the current emphasis upon democratic control in industry. The danger remains real notwithstanding. Nor is it the only danger inherent in a purely economic change. Indeed, it may be questioned whether any economic change has elements of permanence, while it is only economic.
The word efficiency betrays the mind of the age which gave it its current connotation. It was a machine-governed mind; and mechanistic conceptions of life and progress are from the nature of the case unfriendly to the democratic spirit. The appearance of the “efficiency engineer” showed the low estate into which man had fallen—man made once a little lower than the angels but now treated as a little lower than the machine. The business of efficiency engineering was the closer subordination of the man to the machine by methods alleged to be scientific. Nothing could show more plainly than this does the absence of that broad humanism which is the very breath of democracy; and even the generous intention of the socialist ideal was vitiated by the mechanistic character of socialist doctrine. Statecraft itself became an affair of efficiency-engineering on a large scale; and the logic of the mechanistic habit of thought reached its fine flower in the merciless regimentation of the German people and the enthronement of the “Great God Gun.” From this pernicious heresy, we may hopefully expect that reflection on our war-experience may deliver us. Already there are manifest signs of a reaction to a healthier and kindlier conception of life and its meaning. The excessive and artificial centralisation of power in the State is being challenged by a demand for the revival of regional culture and such a redistribution of the functions of government as a recognition of the “region” would require.[4] The business of “unscrambling” the egg, will indeed be long and difficult; but it is clear that any advance in the essential humanities is bound up with a release of life from the artificial integrations forced upon it by the machine civilisation. Mr. Delisle Burns has shown us that the essential note of Greek life was its sociability;[5] and this is indeed a pole to which normal human nature ever swings true. But in the Greek city, sociability was vitiated and ultimately destroyed by the tragic schism of a slave-system; while in modern civilisation it has been poisoned by the dominion of the machine. The swamping of the “region” by the state has enfeebled the natural social bonds of a less sophisticated age; and somehow or other democracy must thread its way back to a simpler and more spontaneous sociability. For the artificial
