Why Idle Rich May Exist.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XL, Issue 10, 7 March 1908, Page 34

Why Idle Rich May Exist.

PREY OF OTHER PARASITES.

(By

George Bernard Shaw.)

We tolerate the idle man of property because he gives employment. Everybody recoils from this proposition with a sense of fundamental fallacy somew'here. The fallacy is not recondite; it lies in confusing two quite different things—employing a man and supporting him. A lunatic employs his keeper; he does not support him. A father supports his daughter; he does not employ her. The idle man of property is like the lunatic; he employs a great many keepers, but he does not support them. He does not even support himself, though he employs himself as best he can in shooting, hunting, racing, motoring, or as an amateur in the arts and sciences. Both he and all his keepers have to be supported by the labour of those who make the food they consume, the clothes they wear, the houses they live in, etc., etc. Thus we find that what the idle man of property does is to plunge into mortal sin against society. He not only withdraws himself from the productive forces of the nation and quarters himself on them as a parasite; he withdraws also a body of propertyless men and places them in the same position, except that they have to earn this antisocial privilege by ministering to his wants and whims. CREATES A CLASS OF WORKERS. lie thus creates and corrupts a class of workers —many of them highly trained and skilled and correspondingly paid —whose subsistence is bound up with his income. They are parasites on a parasite, and they defend the institution of private property with a ferocity which startles their principal, who is often in a speculative way quite revolutionary in his views. They knock the class war theory into a cocked hat by forming a powerful conservative proletariat, whose one economic interest it is that the rich should have as much money to spend as possible, and it is they who encourage and often compel the property owners to defend themselves against the onward march of socialism. Thus we have the phenomenon that seems at first sight so amazing in London—namely, that in the constituencies where the shopkeepers pay the most monstrous rents and the extravagance and insolence of the idle rich are in fullest view no socialist —nay, no progressive—has a chance of being elected to the municipality or to parliament. The reason is that these shopkeepers live by fleecing the rich as the rich live by fleecing the poor. The millionaire, who has preyed upon Bury and Bootle until no workman there has more than his week’s subsistence in hand, and many of them have not even that, is himself preyed upon in Bond-street, Pall Mall, and Long Acre. SHARE PLITNDER WITH FLUNKIES. Some day a poet will arise to do justice to the amazing system of hypnotic brigandage by which the rich are compelled to burden their lives with all

sorts of horrible discomforts and superfluities, so that their plunder may be shared with the tradesman and the flunky. A woman has a pretty dress, made of expensive materials, comfortable, and as good as new. She is forced to take it off and buy a new one of uglier and less convenient shape by a tradesman whom she despises as aysmally beneath her in taste, manners, and social worth. A man who has paid £ 1200 for an automobile with a satisfactory low tension magneto and efficient chain drive is compelled to discard it and pay £ 1500 for a new car with a leaky high tension magneto and a wasteful and dangerous live axle by a salesman whom he thoroughly mistrusts and whom he knows to be as ignorant of mechanics as he himself is. This woman and man, as man and wife, have endless services foisted on them which they do not want, and the moment they accept them a caste system of more than Indian strictness is developed in their houses, and compels them to employ a separate servant for every separate service. The motor car hardly has made its way into the stabl? when it is discovered that the chauffeur cannot possibly clean the car, so another man must be retained for that job. Scullery maids, tweenies, housemaids, parlour maids, footmen, knifeboys, revolving round cook and butler, lady’s maid and valet, and nominally ruled by the housekeeper, all cling to some shred of privilege in the form of something they must not be expected to do. SERVES HER OWN SERVANTS. A woman with no children and a tiny house in Mayfair with accommodation for six people tells you that she cannot do with less than nine servants, who sleep under the stairs or anywhere they can. The buttons and looks and eyes on her dress are purposely placed so that she cannot fasten them herself. She must have a maid to do it. She knows, of course, that other people are as comfortable as she with two or three servants, but she cannot escape from her

nine all the same. They have been made absolutely necessary to her by some power that is stronger than she. She is dragged to the opera, though she may hate music; she is driven to Good wood, though she may loitnc racmg; she has to spend weary weeks on a Scotch moor, keeping a sort of private shooting hotel for men whom she does not care for and for whom her husband, who perhaps hates shooting, does not care either. There is no tyranny on earth to be compared with it. It is so complete that a woman who knows just as well as her husband that our English public schools are largely in the condition of the cities of the plain finds herself as powerless to refuse ti send her sons there as the woman whose house is rated at less than £4O a year is to refuse to send her children to the public elementary schools. The parasitic proletariat says in effect: “It is a matter of life and death to us that you should do these things, and since it is we who organise your life for you—you being to idle (and consequently too weak minded) to organise it for yourself—you shall do them whether you like it or not.” WHOLE COMMUNITY PARASITIC. But there is something more and something worse in the matter than this. The parasitic proletariat not only forces the routine of fashion on the propertied classes; it forces the parasitic system on the entire community. These are the plutocratic retainers whom socialism must convert, coerce or kill, just as capitalism had to convert, coerce or kill the retainers of the feudal barons in so far as they did not obligingly kill one another. The real property owners of this country—the people who are directly parsitic on our industry—are so few and negligible that there are already avowed socialists enough in the country to guillotine them in a week if that summary method were still in fashion. Many of them, having no ilusions as to the alleged comfort and freedom, which the present siystem is supposed ot secure them, ami being heartily tired of having everything they do or wear, or inhabit dictated to them, and of being imposed upon, cheated, and clumsily flattered at every new chain heaped on them, would not risk a scratch in defence of thrie slavery. PECULIAR KIND OF CLASS WAR. But their parasites, the west end tradesmen, the west end professional man, the schoolmaster, the Ritz hotelkeeper, the horse dealer and trainer, the impresario with his guinea stalls, and the ordinary- theatrical manager with his half guinea ones, the huntsman, the jockey, the gamekeeper, the gardener, the coachman, and the huge mass of minor shopkeepers and employees who depend on these, or who, as their children, have prejudices which they call their politics and morals and religion, all these give to parliamentary and social conservatism its real fighting force; and the more “ class conscious ” we make them, the more they will understand that their income while the present system lasts, are bound up with those of the proprietors whom socialism would expropriate. And as many of them are better fed, better mannered, better educated, more confident and successful than the productive proletariat, the class war is not going to be a walk-over for the socialists. When Shelley converted the timid revolutionaries of his time by saying, “ Ye are many, they are few”; when Marx, later on, called on the proletarians of all

lands to unite, they were reckoning without Bond-street. I know better. LIVE BY DESPOILING THE SPOILERS. As what is called an art critic, I have made my living in Bond-street by doing the hypnotising part of the business in the press; persuading the millionaires that they must buy works of art if they want to pass as people of culture, running up. the prices of prima donnas by penning exciting descriptions of their singing, and so on and so forth. And I warn the Socialists that those who live by despoiling the spoilers will not only fight m defence of spoliation more fiercely than the spoilers in chief, but will force these to fight even if they wish to surrender. There is a big and strong sort of seagull called the skua, which never fishes in the sea when it can help it. The skua waits until a common seagull catches and swallows a fish, when it forces the poor gull to disgorge its prey and leave it to the skua. The parasitic proletariat treats the owners of proper tv as the skua treats the gull. It is the skuas my friends, that we shall have to fight or convert. And the difficulty is that just as the skua prefers a regurgitated fish to one fresh from the sea, a British shopkeeper prefers a lord to a common producer as a customer. SHOPKEEPERS COURT THE RICH. William Morris, whose style of dressing made stupid people guess him to be a ship’s purser, used to chuckle at the remarkable change in the warmth of his welcome in certain West End shops when it dawned on the shopkeeper that he was a person of consequence who wanted £SOO worth of something preClous. Diekens long ago gave us the barber who refused to shave a coal heaver. The original of Dickens’ Inspector Bucket was furious because he was sent to arrest a common pickpocket instead of being reserved for murderers and gentlemanly forgers. Until you realise the happiness of licking a duke’s boots and the shame of “attending to” a poor person, you can have no conception of the enormous force of snobbery that fortifies property and privilege. T |c rich, then, do something more than employ the poor. They reflect their glory on them. It is not the duke who enjoys his rank; on the contrary he 5s the sole person who does not enjoy it “' s h ' S , . tailor who en i°ys his outfitter, his bootmaker, his carriage builder, his doctor, his solicitor, his vicar, his valet, down to the crossing sweeper who gets a penny from him Even the executioneer who hangs or guillotines him enjoys his importance and feels that he is demeaning himself when he has to hang a mere commercial traveller the following week.