No More Learning

But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It
is like advising a man who is starving to eat less. For a town or
country labourer to practise thrift would be absolutely immoral. Man
should not be ready to show that he can live like a badly-fed animal. He
should decline to live like that, and should either steal or go on the
rates, which is considered by many to be a form of stealing. As for
begging, it is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take than
to beg. No: a poor man who is ungrateful, unthrifty, discontented, and
rebellious, is probably a real personality, and has much in him. He is
at any rate a healthy protest. As for the virtuous poor, one can pity
them, of course, but one cannot possibly admire them; They have made
private terms with the enemy, and sold their birthright for very bad
pottage. They must also be extraordinarily stupid. I can quite
understand a man accepting laws that protect private property, and admit
of its accumulation, as long as he himself is able under those
conditions to realise some form of beautiful and intellectual life. But
it is almost incredible to me how a man whose life is marred and made
hideous by such laws can possibly acquiesce in their continuance.

However, the explanation is not really difficult to find. It is simply
this. Misery and poverty are so absolutely degrading, and exercise such
a paralysing effect over the nature of men, that no class is ever really
conscious of its own suffering.
They have to be told of it by other
people, and they often entirely disbelieve them. What is said by great
employers of labour against agitators is unquestionably true. Agitators
are a set of interfering, meddling people, who come down to some
perfectly contented class of the community, and sow the seeds of
discontent amongst them. That is the reason why agitators are so
absolutely necessary. Without them, in our incomplete state, there would
be no advance towards civilisation. Slavery was put down in America, not
in consequence of any action on the part of the slaves, or even any
express desire on their part that they should be free. It was put down
entirely through the grossly illegal conduct of certain agitators in
Boston and elsewhere, who were not slaves themselves, nor owners of
slaves, nor had anything to do with the question really. It was,
undoubtedly, the Abolitionists who set the torch alight, who began the
whole thing. And it is curious to note that from the slaves themselves
they received, not merely very little assistance, but hardly any
sympathy even; and when at the close of the war the slaves found
themselves free, found themselves indeed so absolutely free that they
were free to starve, many of them bitterly regretted the new state of
things. To the thinker, the most tragic fact in the whole of the French
Revolution is not that Marie Antoinette was killed for being a queen,
but that the starved peasant of the Vendee voluntarily went out to die
for the hideous cause of feudalism.

It is clear, then, that no Authoritarian Socialism will do. For while
under the present system a very large number of people can lead lives of
a certain amount of freedom and expression and happiness, under an
industrial-barrack system, or a system of economic tyranny, nobody would
be able to have any such freedom at all. It is to be regretted that a
portion of our community should be practically in slavery, but to
propose to solve the problem by enslaving the entire community is
childish. Every man must be left quite free to choose his own work. No
form of compulsion must be exercised over him. If there is, his work
will not be good for him, will riot be good in itself, and will not be
good for others.