The Passionate Friends
I did so shape the world in my mind that it seemed to me no more than a
vast enterprise for the organization and exploitation of labor. For a
time I thought human life was essentially a labor problem, that working
and controlling work and lending and selling and "speculating" made the
essential substance of human life, over which the forms of politics ran
as the stripes of a tiger's skin run and bend over its living muscles. I
followed my period in thinking that. You will find in Ferrero's "Roman
Decline," which was published early in this century, and which waits for
you in the library, almost exactly the method of interpretation that was
recommending itself to me in 1904 and 1905.
Well, the labor problem concerns a great--_substantial_, shall I
say?--in human society. It is only I think the basis and matter of
society, not its shape and life and reality, but it had to be
apprehended before I could get on to more actual things. Insensibly the
idea that contemporary political forms mattered very fundamentally to
men, was fading out of my mind. The British Empire and the German
Empire, the Unity of Italy, and Anglo-Saxon ascendency, the Yellow Peril
and all the other vast phantoms of the World-politician's mythology were
fading out of my mind in those years, as the Olympic cosmogony must have
faded from the mind of some inquiring Greek philosopher in the days of
Heraclitus. And I revised my history altogether in the new light. The
world had ceased to be chaotic in my mind; it had become a vast if as
yet a quite inconclusive drama between employer and employed.
It makes a wonderful history, this history of mankind as a history of
Labor, as a history of the perpetual attempts of an intelligent minority
to get things done by other people. It does not explain how that
aggression of the minority arose nor does it give any conception of a
primordial society which corresponds with our knowledge of the realities
of primitive communities. One begins rather in the air with a human
society that sells and barters and sustains contracts and permits land
to be privately owned, and having as hastily as possible got away from
that difficulty of beginnings, having ignored the large areas of the
world which remain under a pacific and unprogressive agriculture to this
day, the rest of the story becomes extremely convincing and
illuminating. It does indeed give a sustaining explanation to a large
part of recorded history, this generalization about the proclivity of
able and energetic people to make other people do things. One ignores
what is being done as if that mattered nothing, and concentrates upon
the use and enslavement of men.
One sees that enslavement to labor progressing from crude directness to
the most subtly indirect methods. The first expedient of enterprise was
the sword and then the whip, and still there are remote and ugly corners
of the world, in the Mexican Valle Nazionale or in Portuguese South
Africa, where the whip whistles still and the threat of great suffering
and death follows hard upon the reluctant toiler. But the larger part of
our modern slavery is past the stage of brand and whip. We have fallen
into methods at once more subtle and more effective. We stand
benevolently in front of our fellow man, offering, almost as if it were
food and drink and shelter and love, the work we want him to do; and
behind him, we are acutely aware, is necessity, sometimes quite of our
making, as when we drive him to work by a hut-tax or a poll tax or a
rent, that obliges him to earn money, and sometimes not so obviously of
our making, sometimes so little of our making that it is easy to believe
we have no power to remove it. Instead of flicking the whip, we groan at
last with Harriet Martineau at the inexorable laws of political economy
that condemn us to comfort and direction, and those others to toil and
hardship and indignity....
And through the consideration of these latter later aspects it was that
I came at last to those subtler problems of tacit self-deception, of
imperfect and unwilling apprehension, of innocently assumed advantages,
of wilfully disregarded unfairness; and also to all those other problems
of motive, those forgotten questions of why we make others work for us
long after our personal needs are satisfied, why men aggrandize and
undertake, which gradually have become in my mind the essential problems
of human relationship, replacing the crude problems of labor altogether
in that position, making _them_ at last only questions of contrivance
and management on the way to greater ends.
I have come to believe now that labor problems are problems merely by
the way. They have played their part in a greater scheme. This phase of
expropriation and enslavement, this half designed and half unconscious
driving of the duller by the clever, of the pacific by the bolder, of
those with weak appetites and imaginations by those with stronger
appetites and imaginations, has been a necessary phase in human
development. With my innate passionate desire to find the whole world
purposeful, I cannot but believe that. But however necessary it has
been, it is necessary no longer. Strangest of saviors, there rises over
the conflicts of mankind the glittering angular promise of the machine.
There is no longer any need for slavery, open or disguised. We do not
need slaves nor toilers nor mere laborers any more; they are no longer
essential to a civilization. Man has ridden on his brother man out of
the need of servitude. He struggles through to a new phase, a phase of
release, a phase when leisure and an unexampled freedom is possible to
every human being. Is possible. And it is there one halts seeing that
splendid possibility of aspiration and creation before mankind--and
seeing mankind for the most part still downcast, quite unaware or
incredulous, following the old rounds, the grooves of ancient and
superseded assumptions and subjections....
But here I will not trace in any detail the growth of my conviction
that the ancient and heavy obligation to work hard and continually
throughout life has already slipped from man's shoulders. Suffice it
that now I conceive of the task before mankind as a task essentially of
rearrangement, as a problem in relationships, extremely complex and
difficult indeed, but credibly solvable. During my Indian and Chinese
journey I was still at the Marxist stage. I went about the east looking
at labor, watching its organization and direction, seeing great
interests and enterprises replace the diffused life of an earlier phase;
the disputes and discussions in the Transvaal which had first opened my
mind to these questions came back to me, and steadily I lost my interest
in those mere political and national issues with their paraphernalia of
kings and flags and governments and parties that had hitherto blinded me
to these more fundamental interactions.
§ 2
It happened that in Bombay circumstances conspired to bring the crude
facts of labor enslavement vividly before me. I found a vigorous
agitation raging in the English press against the horrible sweating that
was going on in the cotton mills, I met the journalist most intimately
concerned in the business on my second day in India, and before a week
was out I was hard at work getting up the question and preparing a
memorandum with him on the possibility of immediate legislative
intervention. The very name of Bombay, which for most people recalls a
spacious and dignified landfall, lateen sails, green islands and
jutting precipices, a long city of trees and buildings like a bright and
various breakwater between the great harbor and the sea, and then
exquisite little temples, painted bullock carriages, Towers of Silence,
Parsis, and an amazingly kaleidoscopic population,--is for me a reminder
of narrow, foetid, plague-stricken streets and tall insanitary
tenement-houses packed and dripping with humanity, and of terrible
throbbing factories working far into the night, blazing with electric
light against the velvet-black night-sky of India, damp with the
steam-clouds that are maintained to moisten the thread, and swarming
with emaciated overworked brown children--for even the adults, spare and
small, in those mills seem children to a western eye.
I plunged into this heated dreadful business with a passionate interest
and went back to the Yacht Club only when the craving for air and a good
bath and clean clothes and space and respect became unendurable. I waded
deep in labor, in this process of consuming humanity for gain, chasing
my facts through throbbing quivering sheds reeking of sweat and
excrement under the tall black-smoking chimneys,--chasing them in very
truth, because when we came prying into the mills after the hour when
child-labor should cease, there would be a shrill whistle, a patter of
feet and a cuffing and hiding of the naked little creatures we were
trying to rescue. They would be hidden under rugs, in boxes, in the most
impossible places, and we dragged them out scared and lying. Many of
them were perhaps seven years old at most; and the adults--men and women
of fourteen that is to say--we could not touch at all, and they worked
in that Indian heat, in a noisome air drenched with steam for fourteen
and fifteen hours a day. And essential to that general impression is a
memory of a slim Parsi mill-manager luminously explaining the inherited
passion for toil in the Indian weaver, and a certain bulky Hindu with a
lemon-yellow turban and a strip of plump brown stomach showing between
his clothes, who was doing very well, he said, with two wives and five
children in the mills.
That is my Bombay, that and the columns of crossed circles marking
plague cases upon the corners of houses and a peculiar acrid smell, and
the polychromatic stir of crowded narrow streets between cliffs of
architecture with carved timbers and heavy ornamentations, into which
the sun strikes obliquely and lights a thousand vivid hues....
Bombay, the gateway of what silly people were still calling in those
days "the immemorial East," Bombay, which is newer than Boston or New
York, Bombay which has grown beneath the Englishman's shadow out of a
Portuguese fort in the last two hundred years....
§ 3
I came out of these dark corners presently into the sunblaze of India. I
was now intensely interested in the whole question of employment and
engaged in preparing matter for my first book, "Enterprise and India,"
and therein you may read how I went first to Assam and then down to
Ceylon following up this perplexing and complicated business of human
enslavement to toil, exercised by this great spectacle of human labor,
and at once attracted by and stimulated by and dissatisfied with those
socialist generalizations that would make all this vast harsh spectacle
of productive enterprise a kind of wickedness and outrage upon humanity.
And behind and about the things I was looking for were other things for
which I was not looking, that slowly came into and qualified the
problem. It dawned upon me by degrees that India is not so much one
country as a vast spectacle of human development at every stage, in
infinite variety. One ranges between naked savages and the most
sophisticated of human beings. I pursued my enquiries about great modern
enterprises, about railway labor, canal labor, tea-planting, across vast
stretches of country where men still lived, illiterate, agricultural,
unprogressive and simple, as men lived before the first stirrings of
recorded history. One sees by the tanks of those mud-built villages
groups of women with brass vessels who are identical in pose and figure
and quality with the women modelled in Tanagra figures, and the droning
wall-wheel is the same that irrigated the fields of ancient Greece, and