The Collected Articles, Lectures, Essays & Letters of George Bernard Shaw. GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
labor. These are the best terms humanity can make with its tyrant. In the eighteenth century it was easy for the philosophers and for Adam Smith to think of this rule of Nature as being “natural liberty” in contrast to the odious and stupid oppression of castes, priests, and kings — the detested “dominion of man over man.” But we, in detecting the unsoundness of Adam Smith’s private property and laisser-faire recipe for natural liberty, begin to see that though there is political liberty, there is no natural liberty, but only natural law remorselessly enforced. And so we shake our heads when we see Liberty on the title-page of Mr. Tucker’s paper, just as we laugh when we see The Coming Slavery on Mr. Herbert Spencer’s “Man and the State.”
We can now begin to join the threads of our discussion. We have seen that private appropriation of land in any form, whether limited by Individualist Anarchism to occupying owners or not, means the unjust distribution of a vast fund of social wealth called rent, which can by no means be claimed as due to the labor of any particular individual or class of individuals. We have seen that Communist Anarchism, though it partly — and only partly — avoids the rent difficulty, is, in the condition of morals developed under existing Unsocialism, impracticable. We have seen that the delegation of individual powers by voting; the creation of authoritative public bodies; the supremacy of the majority in the last resort; and the establishment and even endowment, either directly and officially or indirectly and unconsciously, of conventional forms of practice in religion, medicine, education, food, clothing, and criminal law, are, whether they be evils or not, inherent in society itself, and must be submitted to with the help of such protection against their abuse as democratic institutions more than any others afford. When Democracy fails, there is no antidote for intolerance save the spread of better sense. No form of Anarchism yet suggested provides any escape. Like bad weather in winter, intolerance does much mischief; but as, when we have done our best in the way of overcoats, umbrellas, and good fires, we have to put up with the winter; so, when we have done our best in the way of Democracy, decentralization, and the like, we must put up with the State.
The Anarchist Spirit
I suppose I must not leave the subject without a word as to the value of what I will call the Anarchist spirit as an element in progress. But before I do so, let me disclaim all intention of embarrassing our Anarchist friends who are present by any sympathy which I may express with that spirit. On the Continent the discussion between Anarchism and Social-Democracy is frequently threshed out with the help of walking-sticks, chair-legs, and even revolvers. In England this does not happen, because the majority of an English audience always declines to take an extreme position, and, out of an idle curiosity to hear both sides, will, on sufficient provocation, precipitately eject theorists who make a disturbance, without troubling itself to discriminate as to the justice of their views. When I had the privilege some time ago of debating publicly with Mr. G. W. Foote on the Eight Hours question, a French newspaper which dealt with the occasion at great length devoted a whole article to an expression of envious astonishment at the fact that Mr. Foote and I abstained from vilifying and finally assaulting one another, and that our partisans followed our shining example and did not even attempt to prevent each other’s champions from being heard. Still, if we do not permit ourselves to merge Socialism, Anarchism, and all the other isms into rowdyism, we sometimes debate our differences, even in this eminently respectable Fabian Society, with considerable spirit. Now far be it from me to disarm the Anarchist debater by paying him compliments. On the contrary, if we have here any of those gentlemen who make it their business to denounce Social-Democrats as misleaders of the people and trimmers; who declaim against all national and municipal projects, and clamor for the abolition of Parliaments and County Councils; who call for a desperate resistance to rent, taxes, representative government and organised collective action of every sort: then I invite them to regard me as their inveterate opponent — as one who regards such doctrine, however sincerely it may be put forward, as at best an encouragement to the workers to neglect doing what is possible under pretext of waiting for the impossible, and at worst as furnishing the reactionary newspapers in England, and the police agents on the Continent, with evidence as to the alleged follies and perils of Socialism. But at the same time, it must be understood that I do not stand here to defend the State as we know it. Bakounine’s comprehensive aspiration to destroy all States and Established Churches, with their religious, political, judicial, financial, criminal, academic, economic and social laws and institutions, seems to me perfectly justifiable and intelligible from the point of view of the ordinary “educated man,” who believes that institutions make men instead of men making institutions. I fully admit and vehemently urge that the State at present is simply a huge machine for robbing and slavedriving the poor by brute force. You may, if you are a stupid or comfortably-off person, think that the policeman at the corner is the guardian of law and order — that the gaol, with those instruments of torture, the treadmill, plank bed, solitary cell, cat o’ nine tails, and gallows, is a place to make people cease to do evil and learn to do well. But the primary function of the policeman, and that for which his other functions are only blinds, is to see that you do not lie down to sleep in this country without paying an idler for the privilege; that you do not taste bread until you have paid the idler’s toll in the price of it; that you do not resist the starving blackleg who is dragging you down to his level for the idler’s profit by offering to do your work for a starvation wage. Attempt any of these things, and you will be haled off and tortured in the name of law and order, honesty, social equilibrium, safety of property and person, public duty, Christianity, morality, and what not, as a vagrant, a thief, and a rioter. Your soldier, ostensibly a heroic and patriotic defender of his country, is really an unfortunate man driven by destitution to offer himself as food for powder for the sake of regular rations, shelter and clothing; and he must, on pain of being arbitrarily imprisoned, punished with petty penances like a naughty child, pack-drilled, flogged or shot, all in the blessed name of “discipline,” do anything he is ordered to, from standing in his red coat in the hall of an opera house as a mere ornament, to flogging his comrade or committing murder. And his primary function is to come to the rescue of the policeman when the latter is overpowered. Members of Parliament whose sole qualifications for election were £1000 loose cash, an “independent” income, and a vulgar strain of ambition; parsons quoting scripture for the purposes of the squire; lawyers selling their services to the highest bidder at the bar, and maintaining the supremacy of the moneyed class on the bench; juries of employers masquerading as the peers of proletarians in the dock; University professors elaborating the process known as the education of a gentleman; artists striving to tickle the fancy or flatter the vanity of the aristocrat or plutocrat; workmen doing their work as badly and slowly as they dare so as to make the most of their job; employers starving and overworking their hands and adulterating their goods as much as they dare: these are the actual living material of those imposing abstractions known as the State, the Church, the Law, the Constitution, Education, the Fine Arts, and Industry. Every institution, as Bakounine saw, religious, political, financial, judicial, and so on, is corrupted by the fact that the men in it either belong to the propertied class themselves or must sell themselves to it in order to live. All the purchasing power that is left to buy men’s souls with after their bodies are fed is in the hands of the rich; and everywhere, from the Parliament which wields the irresistible coercive forces of the bludgeon, bayonet, machine gun, dynamite shell, prison and scaffold, down to the pettiest centre of shabby-genteel social pretension, the rich pay the piper and call the tune. Naturally, they use their power to steal more money to continue paying the piper; and thus all society becomes a huge conspiracy and hypocrisy. The ordinary man is insensible to the fraud just as he is insensible to the taste of water, which, being constantly in contact with his mucous membrane, seems to have no taste at all. The villainous moral conditions on which our social system is based are necessarily in constant contact with our moral mucous membrane, and so we lose our sense of their omnipresent meanness and dishonor. The insensibility, however, is not quite complete; for there is a period in life which is called the age of disillusion, which means the age at which a man discovers that his generous and honest impulses are incompatible with success in business; that the institutions he has reverenced are shams; and that he must join the conspiracy or go to the wall, even though he feels that the conspiracy is fundamentally ruinous to