In the foregoing chapters I have intimated that every phase of the question of freedom for women is bound up with the larger question of human freedom. If it is freedom that women want, they can not be content to be legally equal with men; but having gained this equality they must carry on their struggle against the oppressions which privilege exercises upon humanity at large by virtue of an usurped economic power. All human beings, presumably, would gain by freedom; but women particularly stand to gain by it, for as I have shown, they are victims of special prepossessions which mere legal equality with men may hardly be expected to affect.
If, on the other hand, it is dominance that they desire, they might, indeed, conceivably attain this without freedom; but one can not see much encouragement for that wish in the present trend of affairs. Before women could dominate, they would not only have to overcome the prejudices, superstitions, and legal disabilities which have contributed to their subjection; but they would also have to get the upper hand of men economically. They would have to manœuvre themselves into that advantage in opportunity which men at present enjoy. One can hardly see how this could be brought about except by some kind of coup d’état, for the tendency of modern legislation, as I have shown, far from being calculated to enlarge the scope of women’s economic activity, is likely rather to narrow it; nor is it entirely probable that the establishment of mere legal equality would count for much in the premises, for the courts may always decide that any legislation designed for the Larger Good is valid even though it may clash with the principle of equal rights.[30] Suppose, however, that the momentum gathered by the woman’s movement should carry society through a period of sex-equality and bring it out on the other side—the side of female domination—then men and women would simply have exchanged places, and the social evils which now afflict mankind would remain, mutatis mutandis. Women would be more nearly free than men, as men are now more nearly free than women; but no one would be really free, because real freedom is not a matter of the shifting of advantage from one sex to the other or from one class to another. Real freedom means the disappearance of advantage, and primarily of economic advantage. It can not be too often repeated that political and social freedom are unattainable unless and until economic freedom has been attained—but this is not a concern of either sex or class. In order to live, women, like men, must eat; to eat, they, like men, must labour; to labour, they, like men, must have opportunity. Control of men’s and women’s economic opportunity, therefore, means control of their livelihood, and control of men’s and women’s livelihood means control of men and women. Real freedom, therefore, does not come in sight of either men or women until this control is abated; that is to say, until (speaking in technical terms) the two active factors in production, capital and labour, which are pro tanto sexless, have free access to the passive factor, natural resources—in other words, until the private monopoly of natural resources is dissolved.
If the struggle of women to rid themselves of their peculiar disabilities were to turn out into an attempt to dominate men as men have for so long dominated women, one could perfectly understand the psychology behind such an attempt. With the exception of a few individuals, humankind has thus far achieved no very high idea of freedom. The ambition of subject classes has never gone much beyond the desire to enjoy the privileges usurped by their masters. They have resented being dominated, but not domination; they have had no repugnance to the thought of dominating others. Their psychology was very well summed up by Punch, in the remark of one old market-woman to another (I quote from memory): “You see, Mrs. ——, when we have a Labour Government we’ll all be equal, and then I shall have a servant to do my work for me.” It is because of this myopic view of the nature of freedom that all revolutions have been mere scrambles for advantage, and have accomplished nothing more than a shifting of power from one class to another, or as John Adams said, “a mere change of impostors.” If the woman’s movement should resolve itself into a similar scramble, it would be unfortunate but not surprising, for women may hardly be expected to rise at once above the retaliatory spirit which is one of the common curses of humanity.
They would have good ex parte arguments ready to their tongue; many an argument, indeed, which has been advanced to defend their subjection might be effectively turned around. Their part in parenthood for example, has long been held to justify their subjection under the guise of protection in this function. It would be equally logical to argue that women, as mothers of the race, should dominate the family because, as givers of life, they have a deeper personal interest and a greater natural right in their children than men have. It might be argued that they should control all public affairs because of the greater understanding of the value of human life and deeper interest in the welfare of humanity that motherhood brings. One often hears the argument—which no amount of female bloodthirst in time of war ever seems to make effectively ridiculous—that if women were in power there would be no wars, because they, knowing the cost of giving life, would not consent to its wilful wholesale destruction. The doctrine that women are closer to the race than men is really dangerous to those who now preach it; for it affords the best kind of basis for the contention that women should dominate in all matters concerning the race—and all human affairs may be held to concern the race in one way or another.
Perhaps the best argument for the domination of women is that if society, like parliamentary government, must for ever contemplate a mere sterile succession of outs and ins, it is time that women had their innings. But the analogy with the parliamentary system goes further. Public faith in the parliamentary principle has waned almost to the disappearing-point, and the system has suffered wholesale discredit, because it became slowly but surely evident that what actually kept them up was “the cohesive power of public plunder.” If women took what might be called by analogy the political view of their right to their innings, and let it animate them in a scuffle for predominance, the general reaction would be similar. In a matter of this kind, great numbers of people would be found objective enough to glance at such an effort and pass it by in disapproval of the waste of energy involved in bringing about a readjustment that promised nothing better than a shifting of the incidence of injustice. Women would thus forfeit a great deal of sympathy, and at the same time probably create even more antagonism than they have thus far had to face. They would place themselves in a position similar to that of organized labour, which is so intent on contending for what it conceives to be its own interest—a position of advantage in bargaining on wages and conditions of labour—that by the narrowness of its policy it antagonizes a great deal of public sentiment which must inevitably be enlisted on its behalf if it undertook to contend for the general interest, in which its own is included, and in the service of which its own is bound, in the long run, to be best served.
What the nature of this general interest is, I have already intimated. It is economic, and it can be advanced only through the establishment of an order of society in which every human being shall enjoy the natural right to labour and to enjoy all that his labour produces. It is upon mankind’s security in this right that human freedom, in whatever mode or aspect—social, philosophical, political, religious—primarily depends.
The right to labour and to enjoy the fruits of one’s labour means only the right of free access to the source of subsistence, which is land.[31] If access to that source may be arbitrarily denied, the right to labour is denied, and the opportunity to get one’s living becomes a privilege which may be withheld or granted as suits the need or convenience of the person who bestows it, and wholly on his own terms. If access may be had only on the payment of tribute, the condition abrogates the right to enjoy the fruit of one’s labour, for the tribute consumes a share of it.
While access to land is free, no one need know want; for he may always get his living by applying his labour to natural resources “on his own.” He may always, that is, work for himself instead of depending for his living on the chance to work for an employer. Under such conditions, moreover, no one need content himself, as the labourer is forced to content himself at present, with a small share of what his labour produces, for as Turgot pointed out a century and a half ago, he can always demand of an employer the full equivalent of what he could earn by working for himself. It is clear that under such an economic system, the share of the capitalist in any product would amount only to a fair competitive return on his actual investment. Under the present system the capitalist often enjoys both directly and indirectly the advantage of monopoly, which enables him to appropriate an unfair proportion of his workers’ labour-product. He is a direct beneficiary of monopoly when he holds legal title to the source of his product—cultivable land, mines, forests, water-power—or where he holds franchises or profits by protective tariffs or embargoes. He is an indirect beneficiary when he profits by the competition for work among workers whom monopoly has deprived of free access to land. The steel-trust, as I have remarked, is a striking example of a capitalist organization which benefits both directly and indirectly by monopoly. On the one hand, it monopolizes and holds out of access vast mining-properties, and monopolizes the home market through a protective tariff. On the other, it levies tribute on labour by virtue of the scarcity of opportunity created by monopoly in general.
Another excellent instance of this dual advantage is furnished by the railways of this country. Not only have they received governmental land-grants worth enough to cover their construction-costs many times over, but they hold a valuable franchise-monopoly in the exclusive right to do business over a long continuous strip of land called their “right of way”; by means of which monopoly they drain the commerce of a vast area as a river drains its waters. Through the enormous wealth which these monopolies have enabled them to accumulate, they have been able to influence governmental policy in ways designed to enhance their privileges; for example, they have been able to curtail water-transportation and thus reduce competition. They have profited by tariffs, as through the emergency-law some years ago, which raised the tariff on wheat just enough to cover the difference between the cost of landing a bushel of wheat from the Argentine at one of our Eastern ports, and the rate for transporting it by railway from our Western wheat-fields. Through the Interstate Commerce Commission, of which they captured control almost as soon as it was formed, they are allowed to levy rates which represent not the cost of transportation but the amount which can be exacted for it. So much for their direct benefit from monopoly. Indirectly they benefit in the same way as any other capitalist, through the opportunity to exploit a labour-surplus created and maintained by monopoly; and while they are somewhat hindered in making the most of this opportunity by the effectiveness of defensive organization among their skilled employees, they have a pretty free hand with their thousands of unskilled workers, and manage on the whole to do very well out of them.
Even where the capitalist is not himself to any significant extent a monopolist, he derives great benefit from monopoly, for it is thanks to the monopolist of natural resources that he is able to keep labourers at, or very near, the margin of subsistence. He is not always, however, undisturbed in the enjoyment of his advantage; for he may be himself quite as much at the mercy of monopoly as the workers he exploits. The tenant-farmer affords an excellent example of this. He is the capitalist in the farming-industry, who pays to the land-monopolist tribute in the form of rent, to the railways tribute in exorbitant freight-rates on his implements and products, to the manufacturers of his implements tribute in the form of tariffs. He furnishes the capital necessary for operating the farm, pays the wages of such labour as he may require, and takes for himself what is left after all these charges have been met, which in this country is so little that it does not suffice to pay him both interest on his capital and wages for his own labour—a condition which explains the steady drift of our population from the farms to the cities, and which also accounts for the extraordinary fact that agriculture, which is in volume our greatest industry is, qua industry, bankrupt. All the money in farming is now, and for some time has been, in the rise of land-values. It is evident, then, that save where capital and monopoly are united, capital as well as labour is victimized by monopoly. This is one of the most important facts of our system, and almost everyone overlooks it. The whole producing organization is levied upon by a power which itself performs no service whatever in return for the wealth that it appropriates; which is, on the contrary, an incubus on the producing organization. To put this statement more clearly, the monopolist, whose control of the sources of production makes his exactions inescapable, is limited in those exactions only by the amount that the traffic will bear. If a condition arises which makes a certain kind of production especially desirable, there will naturally be a pressure of people desiring to undertake that kind of production, and the monopolist who controls its source will exact in payment for access to that source an amount fixed by the number of competitors seeking access. He is thus able to absorb all the returns of the industry which depends on his monopoly, except just so much as is necessary to encourage people to keep on with it. For example, during the war the owners of our Western wheat-lands, who had been demanding one-third of the crop in rent, raised the amount to two-fifths, because at the price fixed by the Government wheat-growing was profitable and there were many would-be producers seeking access to wheat-lands. The same condition was reflected in the selling price of land. Farms were sold and resold at advancing prices until land that had sold before the war for sixty-five dollars an acre was bringing two hundred. During the period of deflation thousands of acres bought on mortgages reverted from one buyer to another until the original owner had back his land plus whatever profit he had had from its sale. All this raising of rents and this buying and selling at inflated prices, did nothing for production, obviously, except to drain off the lion’s share of its proceeds into the pocket of the monopolist; for all speculative values must necessarily be paid finally out of production, since there is no other source for them to come from. The producing organization thus carries an enormous load of people who draw their living from it and give neither goods nor services in return; who live, that is to say, by appropriating the labour-products of others without compensation—in other words, by legalized theft.
As monopoly extends and tightens its grip on the sources of production, it is enabled to exact an increasing share of the proceeds, until the point is reached where industry can no longer meet its demands and continue to pay interest and wages. For example, so long as this country had a frontier, the monopolist was in no position to exact a very great share of production, for the producer had the alternative of pushing on to the margin of cultivation where there were as yet no landlords to support. The monopolist, therefore, could exact no more than the difference between what a man might earn in a sparsely settled country, remote from markets, and what he could earn by carrying on production in a more thickly settled and more nearly monopolized region. So long as this condition endured, production in this country was able to pay tribute to monopoly and still pay the capitalist a fairly good rate of interest and the labourer a fairly good wage. But since the late nineteenth century, when the frontier was closed, all the best of the country’s land and natural resources being legally occupied, monopoly has been able to exact an ever greater share of production; for while monopoly progresses, the population grows, and competitive demand for access to the source of production increases; and these two causes combine to cut down free economic opportunity to the disappearing point. Thus it seems only a matter of time until production will break down under the exactions of monopoly and revolution and readjustment will follow. The breakdown has already begun in the basic industry, agriculture, for, as I have stated above, the tenant farmer is no longer able to meet the charges of monopoly and still earn interest and wages. Therefore our agrarian population, literally starved off the land, is steadily drifting to the cities, to swell the numbers of workers who crowd the industrial labour-market. This is to say that our civilization is dying at the root; and this having presently grown too rotten to nourish it or support it, a little wind of revolution or foreign invasion will one day overturn it, as all civilizations which have hitherto existed have been overturned by the same cause. “Latifundia,” said Pliny, “perdiderunt Romam.”
This same economic system exists in all the great countries of the world save Russia, where it broke down under the Czarist régime and has not been re-established. It is farther advanced in the countries of the old world than it is here, because this country is more recently settled. This fact constitutes the only difference between the economic order in the old world and that in the new—a difference in the degree that exploitation has reached.
Wherever exploitation exists, whether in the new world or the old, it exists by means of a governmental organization which its beneficiaries control and use to protect their privileges against the expropriated and exploited masses. There is general agreement among scholars that in government, exploitation came first, and what we know as law and order are its incidental by-products; and that however far the development of these by-products may go, they are never allowed to interfere with exploitation. “The State,” says Oppenheimer, “grew from the subjugation of one group of men by another. Its basic justification, its raison d’être, was and is the economic exploitation of those subjugated.” Both the origin and the essential nature of the State remain perfectly clear so long as the conquering class remains distinct from the subject classes and keeps these in a state of vassalage, without freedom of movement, and subject to transfer from one owner to another along with the land on which they dwell. In our own age, they are quite evident in the dealings of the Western powers with weak peoples, as in India or the Philippine Islands, or the mandated territories under the League of Nations, where foreign Governments, through their military organizations, protect their nationals in an economic exploitation of the native population, and themselves levy taxes upon the natives to pay the costs of the process. The nature and purpose of the State are clear, indeed, in any community where the owning and exploiting class exercises direct control over the propertyless dependent classes as more or less chattels. The landed aristocracy of Europe formerly exercised this direct control, as their titles, now grown meaningless, indicate.
But where the form of the State has undergone a change which precludes this direct control by the owning class, the nature of the State, and its essential function, are obscured. Under the republicanism which succeeded the American and French revolutions, the expropriated classes have gained freedom of movement, a limited freedom of opinion, and a nominal share in the exercise of government. The peasant is no longer bound to the soil he tills; he may leave it at will to seek his fortune elsewhere—on the terms of another landlord. The owning classes no longer directly exercise government or directly enjoy honours and titles by virtue of ownership. The peoples of the Western world, at least where parliamentarism has not broken down, have a nominal freedom with little of the reality. Nominal freedom of movement is worth little to the man who faces the alternative of being exploited where he is, or being exploited elsewhere. Nominal freedom of opinion is not extremely valuable when expression of opinion may cost one the opportunity to earn one’s living; and the right to vote offers little satisfaction when it means merely a right of choice between rival parties and candidates representing exactly the same system of economic exploitation.
The political revolution which followed the breakdown of feudalism did the world its greatest service in launching the idea of freedom; it did nothing—or relatively very little—for its substance. Through its agency the equal right of all human beings to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” has come to be granted in theory though not in fact; it remained for the Russian Revolution to proclaim the further idea that the basis of this right is not political but economic. The political revolution did more; by establishing political democracy, it put into the hands of the people the power to achieve economic democracy by peaceful means. But by that very act it obscured the essential function of the State and the source of its power, which remained clear as long as those who owned ruled directly by virtue of ownership; and thus it hindered a clear perception of the causal relation between privilege and slavery. By abolishing hereditary power, it effected a redistribution of privilege, and at the same time forced privilege to exercise its control of government by indirect means. Privilege was no longer seated on the throne, but it remained, through its control of economic opportunity, the power behind the throne;[32] a power all the more difficult to dislodge now that it exercised control without assuming responsibility. Republicanism has proved the futility of dislodging a privileged class without abolishing privilege; for this simply prepares the way for the rise of a new privileged class which will use government to enforce its exploitation of the propertyless class, in a different way, perhaps, but quite as effectively as its predecessors.
The psychological effect of the political equality established under republicanism is extremely demoralizing. As I have remarked, the subject classes have never desired freedom so much as a chance at the privileges that they see other people enjoy. Political equality, with its breaking-down of class distinctions, creates an impression of equality of opportunity—and indeed to the extent that government maintains no disabling legal discriminations among members of the enfranchised class,[33] it actually establishes equality. No member of that class is excluded from the benefits of privilege by anything save his inability to get possession of it; and this fact, especially in a country where opportunity is comparatively plentiful, is more likely to confirm people in their loyalty to a system under which they stand even a dog’s chance to become beneficiaries of privilege, than it is to stimulate an endeavour to abolish privilege altogether. In this country the incalculable richness of natural resources and the enormous wealth to be gained by speculative enterprise under a government which gives full rein to monopoly, contributed immensely to the corruption of the citizenry. Speculation became the normal course of enterprise, the most approved method of money-getting; and the more ruinously did the monopolist exploit the country’s resources, as Mr. Veblen has pointed out, the greater the regard in which he was held by his fellow citizens. Never before in the world’s history had so many people a chance at the enjoyment of privilege as in the pioneer period of American development. The country’s resources were gutted for profit, not developed for use. The use-value of land was incidental to its value as real estate. Every farmer became a speculator, and consequently the margin of cultivation, instead of being pushed out gradually in response to the natural increase in the country’s needs, was extended artificially and with extreme rapidity, with the result that farms were miles apart and unnecessary difficulties in marketing, and in the maintenance of education and social life, were created. The country resembled the modern city-addition of the real-estater, with all the framework of settlement, waiting for the pressure of population to enhance the selling-price of land. Not only was the public mind corrupted by the apparently limitless opportunity to enjoy privilege—not only was speculation confused with production—but all this opportunity was blindly attributed to the blessings of republicanism. “The greatest government on earth” came to be regarded as the guardian of free opportunity for all citizens, in spite of the very evident fact that no government which protects land-monopoly can possibly maintain freedom of opportunity, for in the course of monopoly all available natural resources are shortly pre-empted, and those people who are born after occupation is complete will find nothing left to pre-empt. Thus American patriotism took on a religious fervour, and the corruption of the populace was complete.
The rise of industrialism has done as much as anything else to engender misapprehension of the State’s essential nature, its chief function, and the source of its power. It is significant that the Physiocrats lived and observed the workings of the State before the industrial era, in an agricultural country, where the relation between land-monopoly and government was direct and inescapable; and that Karl Marx lived and wrote after the rise of the factory-system, in a highly industrialized country. The Physiocrats, for whom the basic economic problem was unobscured, therefore attributed involuntary poverty to its actual cause; while Marx, confusing capital’s fortuitous advantage from monopoly with monopoly itself, laid the responsibility at the door of capitalism. To be sure, Marx recognized and stated the fact that expropriation must precede exploitation; but he did not draw the obvious conclusion that the way to break capital’s power to exploit the worker is by simple reimpropriation. At present there is a general impression that the factory-system lured the population into the cities, and thus caused the overcrowding that results in scarcity of jobs and inadequacy of wage. As a matter of fact, the factory-system found the cities already overcrowded with exploitable labour. In England, for example, the Enclosures Acts had deprived the people of what common land remained to them, and had driven them into the cities where they lived in inconceivable filth and squalor, eking out a miserable existence under the old family-system of industry. The machine-system found all this expropriated and exploitable human material ready to serve its ends—far more, indeed, than it needed, as the riots among the workers deprived of their livelihood by its labour-saving tools, plainly indicated. The industrial revolution, then, did not produce the overcrowding of the labour-market; but the capitalist of the revolution profited by an overcrowding that already existed. He reaped indirectly the fruits of monopoly. He profited likewise, and profits still, by every labour-saving device, for it enabled him at once to dispense with some labourers and, because of the increase of unemployment thus caused, to pay his remaining workers less. Capital was thus enabled to appropriate much more than its rightful share of production, and hence to amass enormous wealth, by means of which it influenced government on behalf of its own further enrichment. In this country, it has secured a system of protective tariffs which amount to a governmental delegation of taxing-power to the protected industries; it gives them a monopoly of the home-market and enables them to add to the price of their product the amount of the tariff which has been set against the competing foreign article. Capital has found other ways of creating monopolies, such as the combinations in restraint of trade at which the ineffectual Sherman law was levelled. As the exactions of monopoly increase, and the exploitation of labour nears the point of diminishing return, the capitalist-monopolist embarks, with the protection of government, on a policy of economic imperialism. He monopolizes the markets of weak nations at the point of his Government’s bayonets. He invests in foreign enterprises which offer high returns for himself and risk of war for the Government which backs him—that is to say, for the exploited masses at home who must support the Government and furnish its soldiers. In short, he constitutes himself a menace to peace and prosperity both at home and abroad; so that it is not to be wondered at if people observing his sinister activities, take capital to be the cause of the economic injustice from which it derives its power. Yet, if natural resources were put freely in competition with industry for the employment of labour, the inflamed fortunes of the capitalist class would disappear. Monopoly having been abolished,[34] the capitalist-monopolist would no longer exist, and the capitalist would no longer be in a position to exact from production anything more than his rightful interest—that is, as I have said, the amount fixed by free competitive demand for the use of his capital.
There is yet another cause of confusion in the long-established custom of regarding land as private property, whereas it is not, rightly speaking, private property at all, but the source from which property is produced by the combined efforts of labour and capital. The right to property in wealth which has been produced, as, for instance, the coat on one’s back, may be defended on the ground that it is the product of one’s own labour, or has been acquired through exchange of an equivalent amount of one’s own product; but the right to property in land can not be defended on the same ground, because land is not a labour-product. The distinction is simply between labour-made property and law-made property. Under our present system of tenure, to be sure, the purchase price of land—that is, the investment of capital that the owner has made in order to get title—may represent human labour—but this is merely to say that the owner has invested his capital in privilege, or law-made property; that he has purchased, under governmental guarantee, a certain delegation of taxing-power, precisely as the investor in governmental securities purchases a governmental guarantee that a certain share of future labour-products will be taken from the producers and turned over to him. The fact that, under political government, capital may be invested in privilege in no wise alters the iniquitous nature of privilege, and a sound public policy would disallow an investor’s plea of good faith ex post facto.[35] Under a system which did not permit such investments, those people who wished to put their capital to gainful use would invest it in the only legitimate way, which is in productive enterprise.
It is, perhaps, partly because of the confusion of thought produced by all these causes, that no revolution has ever abolished the exploiting State and the privileges that it exists to secure. But it must also be remembered that all revolutions have risen out of factional disputes or class-wars, and that in the latter case, the chief interest of the revolting class has been not to abolish privilege but to redistribute it. The French Revolution, for instance, expropriated the land-owning nobility, but its politicians dared not abolish private land-monopoly, for the bourgeoisie which supported the revolution would not have tolerated such an interference with their own enjoyment of privilege. In one important respect the Russian Revolution is an exception to this rule. It is a class-revolution, but its avowed ultimate purpose is to abolish even that State-organization which itself at present maintains.[36] It is too early for any forecast to be made concerning the outcome of this attempt; but whether it succeeds or not, the Russian Revolution has already performed an inestimable service to the world in proclaiming that the nature of freedom is not political but economic, and in refusing, as a State-organization, to use its power for the maintenance of an idle, rent-consuming class, living by the exploitation of labour at home or in spheres of influence abroad.
In order to abolish privilege it is not necessary, in a political democracy, to wait for the economic breakdown which its exactions inevitably bring about—that is to say, it is not necessary to wait until the number of wasteful idlers that production must support shall become so numerous and so wasteful that it can no longer meet their exactions. The ballot has been a pretty ineffectual weapon in the hands of the rank and file, but—so much must be said for republicanism—it could be made effective. First, however, the rank and file would have to learn what it is that this weapon should be used against—it would have to become aware of the nature of real freedom, and to wish real freedom to prevail. The power of privilege under republicanism depends not only on its control of wealth, but much more upon its control of thought and opinion. That a campaign of education among the voters can seriously endanger the position of privilege was proved in England during the great land-values campaign of 1914, which was cut short by the war. But the task of education is not easy, because of the conditions I have just been discussing, which obscure the essential nature of privilege, and of the State. We have had in this country a great deal of outcry against privilege, and it has aroused considerable popular sympathy; but the zeal engendered thereby has not advanced the cause of freedom, because the outcry was directed against the capitalist and the exploiting power gained by his fortuitous advantage from privilege, but not against privilege itself. The nature of privilege was obscured. It is evidently necessary, then, if the ballot is ever to be successfully employed against privilege, to know what privilege means and to clear away all confusion about it, so that the voters may see what is at fault in our economic system, and what remedial steps are necessary.
The essential nature of freedom has been already shown. It comes out in the abolition of monopoly, primarily monopoly of natural resources, resulting in complete freedom of the individual to apply his productive labour where he will. It is freedom to produce, and its corollary, freedom to exchange—the laissez-faire, laissez-passer of the Physiocrats. How this freedom is to be obtained is not for me to say. I am not a propagandist, nor do I regard the question as at present so important as that of establishing a clear understanding of the nature of freedom. When enough people come to see that the root of all bondage, economic, political, social—even the bondage of superstition and taboo—is expropriation, reimpropriation will not be long in following; and it may be achieved by a method quite different from all those which theorists have thus far devised. When people know what they need, they are usually pretty resourceful about finding means to get it; and so long as they do not know what they need, all the means of securing it that can be suggested, however excellent, must remain ineffective from the lack of sufficient will to use them.
In the foregoing chapters I have spoken of the effect that freedom would have upon this or that phase of human relations. There is really no field of human activity that would not be profoundly affected by it. A system of free economic opportunity would exert upon the lives of human beings precisely as great an influence as that exerted by the present economic system: that is to say, their mode of life, their education, their quality of spirit, their cast of thought, would all be determined by their command of wealth, precisely as they now are. But where the present economic system operates to place the great mass of wealth at the command of a very small percentage of the population and thus to keep the majority in an involuntary and oppressive poverty unfavourably affecting body, mind and spirit in a thousand ways, a system of free opportunity would place in the hands of every human being all the wealth that his labour, freely employed, could produce, and at the same time it would relieve productive labour from the heavy burden of privilege. Thus that huge share of wealth which now goes to maintain the privileged classes in luxurious idleness, and that further huge share which supports vast bureaucracies and keeps up armies and navies to secure the foreign investments of the privileged classes, would be diverted to its proper use. The number of workers would be augmented by all those privilegees and placeholders who now live without producing;[37] but opportunity would be increased in infinitely greater proportion; therefore these newcomers would find no difficulty in supporting themselves. On the other hand, the immense reduction in luxury and waste thus brought about would very much shorten the hours of labour. The worker whose labour, in addition to maintaining himself and his dependents, is supporting two or three idlers and paying for a share of governmental waste besides, must necessarily spend many more hours at work than the worker whose exertions are required only for the support of himself and his natural dependents. But while the labour of each producer would decrease, production would be increased by the opening of new opportunities, by the increase in number of the producers, and by the enhanced power of consumption made possible through their greater command of wealth. The redistribution which would follow upon the establishment of free opportunity, and the curtailment of waste, would satisfy a share of this new demand; but just as production and exchange, in a period of comparative prosperity at present, are stimulated by the increased consuming power of the public, so, when artificial restrictions on production had been removed, the increased power of consumption which would result would act as a permanent stimulus to production and exchange.
I will not speculate about the conditions arising during the period of adjustment to the new conditions of economic freedom. If bad, they would be but temporary, and though they are often magnified as arguments against freedom by those who either can not or do not wish to see beyond them, they have no proper place in this discussion, which is concerned only with the permanent effect of free opportunity on the lives, spirits and minds of human beings. It may be doubted that the intercalary hardships of the transition would be great; but if they were to be twice as great as the most timorous would forecast them, would they not be preferable to those attending the protraction of the present system to its inevitable break-up? That is the real question. Thomas Jefferson said that rather than the French Revolution should fail, he would see half Europe perish, and “though but an Adam and Eve were left in every country, and left free, it would be better than it is now.”
Who can picture the profound alteration in the attitude of people toward life and their fellow-beings, if they were but emancipated from the fear of want which now besets all of humankind? Even the rich and the well-to-do are not exempt from this fear; for an economic security based on an unsound economic system is like those walks which are thrown along the thin crust of earth among the geysers of Yellowstone Park, where those who walk them are in danger that a misstep may plunge them through the thin crust to perish in the scalding heat beneath. While an economic system based upon the legalized robbery of one class by another remains in force, the abyss of involuntary poverty will always yawn for those who may lose their command of wealth through their own incapacity for management, or through circumstances beyond their control. It seems likely that an instinctive sense of this is at least partly responsible for the constant effort of people already well off to increase their fortunes. It is certainly responsible for a great deal of effort to get wealth by dishonest means—that is to say, by those forms of dishonesty which are without legal sanction. The fear of want produces avarice, chicanery, fraud, servility, envy, suspicion, distrust. It leads to unlegalized theft, to murder, to prostitution. It produces a class of people who, in a society which denies free opportunity and puts a premium on graft, live by their wits, and in so doing often display an energy and ability which would be useful to a society that offered it no opportunity save that for honest and useful employment. Moreover, this fear of want keeps the great majority of people constantly occupied with the means of existence, when they should properly be devoting a large share of their time to the fulfilment of its purpose, which is that enjoyment gained from developing one’s spiritual capacities and pursuing spiritual interests. Those thus preoccupied can not employ with either imagination or profit what leisure they have. Rather, they will merely use their leisure to overcome their weariness of themselves. Their pleasures will be mere pastimes, of the kind that subvert thought and dull imagination. Thus little scope is left for the higher activities of the spirit, and the quality of life is impoverished.
The spiritual effects of the fear of want are naturally most clearly observable in countries where it is most widespread and deep-rooted. England offers a particularly good field for observation of these phenomena, for economic exploitation by a conquering class which has merged into a powerful owning aristocracy, is there advanced to the point of breakdown; therefore all the results of economic exploitation are present in overflowing measure. The most striking, perhaps, are the servility and snobbery which find sanction even in the Church catechism, in the passage admonishing candidates for confirmation to order themselves lowly and reverently unto all their betters—that is to say, those born to a higher place in the social order. The English novelists, from the days of Richardson and Fielding down to the present, have faithfully recorded the unlovely characteristics bred in a people by the ever-present necessity of keeping an eye to the main chance; by the knowledge that fortune may depend less on merit and ability than on a servile currying of favour with those powerful persons who, through the fortuitous circumstance of birth, are in control of economic opportunity. Richardson was himself demoralized by the social system to which the economic system had given rise. His acceptance of arrogance in the owning class and abjectness in the exploited, shows how acquiescence in injustice can corrupt even a man of genius. “Pamela” is a veritable study in servility; an unconscious and devastating exposition of the basic principle of English society. Fielding, on the other hand, was too critical to be corrupted by it, and his books are all the more valuable for the objectivity with which he presents the demoralization that a predatory economic system has produced. What an array of characters he parades before his readers—avaricious, envious, suspicious, self-seeking, arrogant, venal! Even the hero of his great novel, “Tom Jones,” is not above prostituting himself to an elderly lady of wealth when he finds himself in danger of want and with no more honest means of getting a living, having been brought up as a gentleman, that is to say, an idler. This greatest of English novelists was well aware of the effect produced on the collective life of his nation by an arbitrary division of human kind into “High people and Low people,” and he took occasion to comment upon it with a penetrating satire.
Now the world being divided thus into people of fashion and people of no fashion, a fierce contention arose between them; nor would those of one party, to avoid suspicion, be seen publicly to speak to those of the other, tho’ they often held a very good correspondence in private ... but we who know them, must have daily found very high persons know us in one place and not in another, today and not tomorrow; ... and perhaps if the gods, according to the opinions of some, made men only to laugh at them, there is no part of our behavior which answers the end of our creation better than this.
One might say that the profuseness of unamiable qualities with which Fielding endows so many of his characters, was due to a peculiar humour or pessimism in this writer, if one did not find those same qualities plentifully distributed among the characters of his successors. Dickens created a whole gallery of highly interesting and unadmirable folk, and one finds such faithful counterparts in Thackeray, for example, or in George Eliot, that they are to be explained not as the mere creation of any author’s imagination, but as a product of the society in which he lived and observed.
There is material for an excellent study of the relation of the economic and social system to the literary art, in the important rôle that money plays in English fiction. That intense preoccupation with the means of existence which is enforced by the fear of want, has profoundly affected the plots and characters of English novels. The number of plots which hinge on someone’s attempt to get someone else’s money, is astonishing. The number of men and women who either marry or attempt to marry for money, is legion; and no English novelist has the hardihood to settle his characters for life without providing them with a living, generally through inheritance or the generosity of some wealthy patron. It is significant that if they are going to make their own fortunes they usually strike out to make them in the new world, where there is some opportunity. The preoccupation with getting money, not through industry but through inheritance, cadging, or chicanery, is reduced to its lowest terms in the stories of W. W. Jacobs about life along the waterfront of London. These entertaining and racy stories, with monotonous regularity, present one theme, and that theme is the attempt of one character to do another—usually his closest associate—out of some trifling sum of money. It is interesting to note that one of the striking differences between English and American fiction is that where the former deals with money-getting the latter is likelier to deal with money-making. The one represents a society where opportunity is pretty thoroughly monopolized; the other a society in which it is as yet somewhat less so.
It is not the fear of want alone which demoralizes and corrupts. In a society where the greatest respect is paid to those who live in idleness through legalized theft; where men of genius may be treated like lackeys by those whose only claim to superiority is their command of wealth; where industry and ability yield smaller returns than flattery and servility; in such a society there is little to encourage honesty and independence of spirit. So long as honour is paid to those who live by other people’s labour, in proportion to their power of commanding it, so long will praise of honesty, industry, and thrift savour of hypocrisy, and so long will the mass of people be under small temptation to cultivate these virtues; and so long, also, will the moralists who seek to inculcate them be open to the same suspicion of insincerity as are those bankers who stand to profit substantially by the thrift they preach among depositors. There is something grimly amusing in the complaints so frequently heard from those who live in ease, about the shiftlessness of the working classes and their dishonest workmanship; complaints which are well founded, perhaps, but do not take into account the slight incentive that is furnished by the knowledge that the profits of industry and honest workmanship will be diverted into other pockets than those of the workers. If labour takes every opportunity of giving as little as it can for as much as it can get, one must remember that it but follows the example set by the owning classes, an example that has yielded them rich returns both in wealth and in the esteem of their fellow-men. Under a free economic system no such demoralizing example would exist. The material rewards of honesty, industry, and thrift would accrue to those who practised these virtues; and since there would be no opportunity to gain esteem through the appropriation of other people’s labour, those who wished to enjoy it would be forced to depend on more worthy means, such as ability, integrity, and uprightness in their dealings with other people.
In a free society, ignorance, vice and crime would tend to disappear. We should have no people in high places whose large-scale theft would make them fitter inmates for jails, and no people in jails for those petty thefts to which need is a perennial incentive. Jails, indeed, would be very little needed by such a society; for what with the abolition of the State, with its long list of law-made crimes, and the disappearance of those social conditions which are largely responsible for the few infractions of moral law which constitute real crime, there would be very few offenders to occupy them. I have already remarked that need is a constant incentive to theft; it is also the chief cause of ignorance; and ignorance and misery are fecund sources of vice, as well as of the physical and mental degeneracy which result in imbecility and idiocy. If need were removed, if every human being were assured from birth of physical well-being and ample opportunity to develop mentally to the full extent of his capacity, these distressing results of involuntary poverty would not long exist to menace the peace and health of communities and fill reformers and eugenists with alarm. The cities where human beings are crowded together under conditions subversive of health and decency would be gradually emptied of their surplus population. At present they are largely asylums for the expropriated, but when land was once more freely available they would resume their natural character as centres of industry and exchange. There would be no more centres of want, misery and vice, like centres of infection, to menace the health and well-being of society. Man, reclaimed by the land which is his natural home, would appear for what he really is, a child of the earth, rather than an industrial machine far removed from his rightful heritage of close, health-giving connexion with the soil from which his sustenance comes. Life, in short, having been placed on its natural basis, might be expected to proceed along natural lines of development. Mankind, assured of physical health, would progress steadily in health of mind and activity of spirit; and being freed from its pressing need to take thought of the morrow, it would have leisure to seek the kingdom of heaven—not that heaven which the church promises as a future reward for orthodox communicants, but the kingdom of heaven which “is within you,” the happiness that comes from the harmonious development of the highest faculties of body, mind and spirit, and their use in the promotion of a beautiful individual and collective life. Superstition and intolerance would disappear with the ignorance that produces them. Thought would no longer be hampered either by fear or the consciousness of dependence on an order of things unfit to bear the light of reason; but every human being would be free to exercise that independence of mind that only the most courageous or the most securely placed may allow themselves at present. The long story of martyrdom for opinion would come to an end when freedom of opinion no longer threatened a vested interest in the perpetuation of injustice. Thus that “progressive humanization of man in society” which is civilization in the highest sense, would be in a way to be promoted as it has never been promoted in any society of which the world has knowledge.
Theoretically, it might still be possible for free economic opportunity and its benefits to exist for men only or for women only; but in order to exclude a whole sex from participation in them, it would be necessary to reduce its members to the status of chattels. Now, to reduce half of humanity to slavery is practically unthinkable; it would necessitate a reversion to an order of thought that has largely been outgrown; for all social injustice, in the last analysis, is founded in an ignorance and prejudice which cause even its victims to acquiesce in it. Indeed, without this acquiescence, social injustice may be called impossible. “After the primary necessities of food and raiment, freedom is the first and strongest want of human nature.” Because of this instinct for freedom, the subjection of any class in society can be continued only so long as that class itself fails clearly to realize the injustice of its position; when it comes into a clear realization of this injustice it will demand and eventually obtain the removal of its disabilities. The subjection of women, such as it has been, lasted only so long as women themselves acquiesced in it.[38] When they developed a sense of injury, they began to demand the equality with men which is their right, and ignorance, prejudice and superstition are yielding before the demand. There is no reason to suppose that women, having progressed thus far, would tolerate without a sharp struggle any reversion to the injustice from which they have escaped. Ignorance, prejudice, and superstition, moreover, are incompatible with the enlightenment which will be necessary in order to secure economic justice even for one-half of humanity; for that enlightenment postulates not only the desire to enjoy freedom oneself, but the desire that all people may enjoy it—that is, it postulates repudiation of the idea of dominance. Thus society not only could not endure half slave, half free; it would not wish so to endure.
Women are at present under certain disabilities which legal equality with men can hardly be expected to remove. Those disabilities are:
1. Economic: Women are the victims of unjust discriminations in industry and the professions in regard to training, opportunities, tenure of employment, and wages. They are also victimized by ill-considered “welfare” legislation sponsored by benevolent persons, and by male workers whose purpose is to rid themselves of unwelcome competition.[39]
If legal equality of the sexes were established, women might be able, under the law, to force public industrial schools to give them equal opportunities for training; they might also be able to enforce a demand for equal pay with men for equal work. It is even conceivable that they might force employers to lay off workers, during periods of depression, on a proportional basis—men and women together, in proportion to the number of each sex employed. All this, however, would entail unremitting vigilance, and great effort in getting legal enactments; it would also entail a great deal of governmental machinery, with all the waste and ineffectiveness implied by the term; and it would leave the general labour-problem precisely where it is at present. As for the matter of opportunity, so long as industry is in the hands of private concerns, I see no way by which employers can be forced under an equal-rights law to employ women where they prefer to employ men. Nor is there any certainty that legal equality will save working women from having the race “safeguarded” at their expense. But if land were put freely in competition with industry for the employment of labour, all these disabilities would disappear. Women would enjoy the same freedom as men to get their living by their labour, and since there would be no such thing as a labour-surplus, their wage, like that of men, would be the full product of their labour, and not that share which employers or governmental boards thought fit to grant them. There would be no need for reformers or other benevolent persons to secure them fair hours and conditions of labour, or to get them excluded from hazardous employments; for there is no way to make a worker accept onerous conditions of labour from an employer if he have an ever-present alternative of going out and creating more agreeable conditions by working for himself. The worker whose independent position makes it possible to refuse to work an excessive number of hours or under unhealthful or dangerous or disagreeable conditions, will simply refuse, and there will be an end of it. Thus employers, instead of being prevented from exploiting women beyond a certain point, would be rendered incapable of exploiting anyone in any degree. Nor would male workers longer have any incentive to avail themselves of “protective” legislation in order to reduce the competition of women with men in the labour-market; for it is only where opportunity is artificially restricted that there are “not enough jobs to go around.”
Certain direct consequences of the economic inferiority of women might be expected to disappear when that inferiority no longer existed. Foremost among these is the demoralizing temptation to get their living by their sex. Prostitution would disappear from a society which offered women ample opportunity to earn their living without doing violence to their selective sexual disposition. Marriage would no longer be degraded to the level of a means of livelihood, as it is today for a great many women; for economic security would no longer in any wise depend upon it. This being the case, the expectation now put upon women to undertake marriage as a profession would disappear, and marriage would come to be regarded in the light of a condition, freely and voluntarily assumed by both sexes, who would jointly and equally undertake its responsibilities. Under such circumstances, one might confidently expect a further modification of institutionalized marriage which would remove all those privileges and disabilities now legally enforced on either party by virtue of the contract. The idea that woman’s place is the home—which implies that marriage, for her, necessarily involves acquiescence in a traditional sexual division of labour and a traditional mode of life—with all its disabling economic and psychological consequences, would disappear from a society in which she was able freely to choose her occupation according to her abilities. Thus, from the status of a class regarded as being divinely ordained to be the world’s housekeepers, women would emerge into the status of human beings, free to consult their interests and inclinations in the ordering of their lives, without regard to traditional expectations which, being no longer enforced by economic or legal sanctions, would have no longer any power over them.
2. Psychological: Those prejudices and superstitions which now hamper women in their development and in the ordering of their lives, might be expected to disappear from a free society. In so far as they are the consequences of woman’s subjection, they would yield before her emergence into the status of a human being, sharing equally with man in the freedom of opportunity that would result from the establishment of economic justice, and the increased cultural advantages that freedom of opportunity would bring. In so far as they are the outgrowth of primitive ignorance and superstition, they would yield before the increased intelligence and enlightenment which might be expected to result from the abundance and leisure afforded to every human being by economic freedom. Thus those artificial differentiations between the sexes which have been built up by fear, by superstitions, and by masculine dominance, would tend to disappear. Women would no longer be regarded as extra-human beings endowed with superhuman powers for good or ill; they would no longer be regarded exclusively or chiefly as a function, being no longer forced to occupy that status; theories of their mental and spiritual inferiority based on the results of centuries of subjection would yield before a more humane and scientific attitude; and as freedom promoted individuation among women, it would become evident that the traditional notions concerning the feminine nature were drawn from qualities which, having been bred by their subjection, should have been regarded as characteristics not of a sex but of a class.
3. Social: The superstitious notion that woman’s honour is a matter of sex would disappear with the masculine dominance from which it resulted. When women need no longer depend on marriage for their living or their social position, they will no longer be under any great compulsion to make their sexual relations conform to standards which have been adapted to suit the interests, desires and tastes of men. Being economically independent of men, they will be at liberty to consult their own interests, desires and tastes, in this as in other matters. They may desire to preserve those habits of virginity before marriage and chastity after it, which have been imposed upon them under masculine dominance; but they will be under no external compulsion to do so. When they have no longer a professional interest in conforming to the conventional moral code, their sexual relations will cease to be regarded as falling within the purview of morality at all; rather they will be, as those of men have been, a question of manners. For when a moral precept no longer has social or economic sanctions to enforce it, its observance ceases to be a matter of worldly interest or expediency, and becomes a matter of personal taste. Then, if it be not sound, it will be repudiated; if it be sound, the individual who allows himself to be guided by it will profit spiritually by doing so, because his obedience will respond to his own instinct for what is good, rather than to an external pressure.
The spiritual gain that will come through the release from bondage to superstition, discrimination and taboo, is incalculable. Freed from her slavery to catchwords, woman will be able to discover and appraise for herself the true spiritual values which catchwords usually obscure. Having no longer any need to preserve a fearful regard for what other people may think of her, she will be at liberty to regulate her conduct by what she wishes to think of herself; and hence she will be able to cast aside the hypocrisy, duplicity and dissimulation that must be bred in any class of people whose position in society depends not upon what they are but upon what they appear to be. Having attained to the full humanity which this emancipation implies, she will gain sufficient respect for her sex to tolerate no discriminations against it. Thus we may expect to see her sexual function of motherhood placed on a basis of self-respect, and the barbarous injustice of illegitimacy relegated to the limbo of forgotten abuses. Woman will for the first time undergo the profound and weighty experience of responsibility to herself, rather than to social institutions and arrangements which were made for her, and whose nature is not such as to command the deference of a free agent. Free from the tyranny of the expected, from the disabling consequences of surveillance and repression, women will for the first time be able to develop to their full stature as human beings, in accordance with the law of spiritual growth which has so long been thwarted and perverted by the usages of society.
I have given only a general idea of what economic freedom would do to promote human happiness. Its effect upon the lives and characters of men would be quite as emancipating as upon those of women; but this I have not space to consider in detail. In passing, however, I might remark that not the least of the benefits that men would gain by it would be relief from the worry and humiliation which the support of women so often involves at present. “I have taken mistreatment from that conductor,” said a young musician recently, “that I never would have stood for if I were single. But I have a wife, and that makes us all cowards.” A free people would outgrow on the one hand the sheepishness that fear of want begets, and on the other the arrogance bred by consciousness of power. Men would no longer need endure humiliation for the sake of keeping their jobs; and those over them would be estopped from arrogance by the knowledge that they were dealing with free men who were under no compulsion to tolerate it.
If it appear that I envisage utopian results from the institution of economic freedom, let me assume the possibility that those spiritual results which I foresee might not come about. If they did not come about, however, their failure to do so would imply a profound and inexplicable change for the worse in human nature; for if the world’s history proves anything, it is that there is in mankind a natural disposition to aspire toward what is ennobling and beautiful, and that this disposition is favoured by economic security—especially where it is not associated with irresponsible power—and thwarted by involuntary poverty. Why is it that the middle classes are regarded as the “backbone” of society, if not because they have had enough command of wealth to enable the maintenance of health and a high standard of education, without that excess and power which too often breed idleness and arrogance? Leisure and abundance stimulate independence of spirit, thought, education, creative activity. Penury leads to demoralization, ignorance, dulness. This has been the world’s experience in the past. “There is in man,” says Goethe, “a creative disposition which comes into activity as soon as his existence is assured. As soon as he has nothing to worry about or to fear, this semi-divinity in him, working effectively in his spiritual peace and assurance, grasps materials into which to breathe its own spirit.” Why should one assume that this spirit will pass over the material offered by life itself and the relations of human beings with one another? It has not done so in the past. Throughout mankind’s long martyrdom of exploitation, through all the struggling and hatred engendered thereby, this semi-divinity in man has been leading him towards a more humane conception of life. The spiritual peace and assurance resulting from economic justice would set all human beings free not only to share in this conception but to realize it—to establish upon earth that ideal life of man which, in the words of George Sand, “is nothing but his normal life as he shall one day come to know it.”
The whole point of the foregoing, for present purposes, is this: It is impossible for a sex or a class to have economic freedom until everybody has it, and until economic freedom is attained for everybody, there can be no real freedom for anybody. Without economic freedom, efforts after political and social freedom are nugatory and illusive, except for what educational value they may have for those concerned with them. The women of the United States, having now got about all that is to be had out of these efforts—enough at any rate, to raise an uneasy suspicion that their ends are lamentably far from final—are in a peculiarly good position to discern the nature of real freedom, to see which way it lies, and to feel an ardent interest in what it can do for them. My purpose, then, is not deliberately to discourage their prosecution of any enfranchising measures that may lie in their way to promote, and still less to disparage the successes that they have already attained. It is rather to invite them thoughtfully to take stock of what they have really got by these successes, to consider whether it is all they want, and to settle with themselves whether their collective experience on the way up from the status of a subject sex does not point them to a higher ideal of freedom than any they have hitherto entertained.
In the past century, women have gained a great deal in the way of educational, social and political rights. They have gained a fair degree of economic independence. They are no longer obliged to “keep silence in the churches,” as they still were at the beginning of the nineteenth century; indeed, certain sects have even admitted them to the ministry. The women who now enjoy this comparative freedom, and accept it more or less as a matter of course, are indebted to a long line of women who carried on the struggle—sometimes lonely and discouraging—against political, legal, social and industrial discrimination, and to the men, as well, who aided and encouraged them. Thanks to the efforts of these pioneers, the women of today have a new tradition to maintain, a nobler tradition than any of those which women were expected to observe in the past: the tradition of active demand for the establishment of freedom. They will be none the less under obligation to continue this demand when the freedom that shall remain to be secured is of a kind not envisaged by their predecessors. Rather, in the measure that they proceed beyond those ends that seemed ultimate to their predecessors, they will prove that these built well; for the best earnest of advancement is the attainment of an ever new and wider vision of progress.
The organized feminist movement in England and America has concerned itself pretty exclusively with securing political rights for women; that is to say, its conception of freedom has been based on the eighteenth century misconception of it as a matter of suffrage. Women have won the vote, and now they are proceeding to use their new political power to secure the removal of those legal discriminations which still remain in force against their sex. This is well enough; it is important that the State should be forced to renounce its pretension to discriminate against women in favour of men. But even if we assume that the establishment of legal equality between the sexes would result in complete social and economic equality, we are obliged to face the fact that under such a régime women would enjoy precisely that degree of freedom which men now enjoy—that is to say, very little. I have remarked that those who control men’s and women’s economic opportunity control men and women. The State represents the organized interest of those who control economic opportunity; and while the State continues to exist, it may be forced to renounce all legal discriminations against one sex in favour of the other without in any wise affecting its fundamental discrimination against the propertyless, dependent class—which is made up of both men and women—in favour of the owning and exploiting classes. Until this fundamental discrimination is challenged, the State may, without danger to itself, grant, in principle at least, the claims to political and legal equality of all classes under its power. The emancipation of negroes within the political State has not notably improved their condition; for they are still subject to an economic exploitation which is enhanced by race-prejudice and the humiliating tradition of slavery. The emancipation of women within the political State will leave them subject, like the negro, to an exploitation enhanced by surviving prejudices against them. The most that can be expected of the removal of discriminations subjecting one class to another within the exploiting State, is that it will free the subject class from dual control—control by the favoured class and by the monopolist of economic opportunity.
Even this degree of emancipation is worth a good deal; and therefore one is bound to regret that it has no guarantee of permanence more secure than legal enactment. Rights that depend on the sufferance of the State are of uncertain tenure; for they are in constant danger of abrogation either through the failure of the State to maintain them, through a gradual modification of the laws on which they depend, or through a change in the form of the State.[40] At the present moment the third of these dangers, which might have seemed remote ten years ago, may be held to be at least equally pressing with the other two. It is a misfortune of the woman’s movement that it has succeeded in securing political rights for women at the very period when political rights are worth less than they have been at any time since the eighteenth century. Parliamentary government is breaking down in Europe, and the guarantees of individual rights which it supported are disappearing with it. Republicanism in this country has not yet broken down, but public confidence in it has never been so low, and it seems certainly on the way to disaster. No system of government can hope long to survive the cynical disregard of both law and principle which government in America regularly exhibits. Under these circumstances, no legal guarantee of rights is worth the paper it is written on, and the women who rely upon such guarantees to protect them against prejudice and discrimination are leaning on a broken reed. They will do well to bear this in mind as they proceed with their demands for equality, and to remember that however great may be their immediate returns from the removal of their legal disabilities, they can hardly hope for security against prejudice and discrimination until their natural rights, not as women but as human beings, are finally established. This is to say that if they wish to be really free they must school themselves in “the magnificent tradition of economic freedom, the instinct to know that without economic freedom no other freedom is significant or lasting, and that if economic freedom be attained, no other freedom can be withheld.”