THE CASE AGAINST INEQUALITY.

Pukekohe & Waiuku Times, Volume 4, Issue 20, 12 March 1915, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE CASE AGAINST INEQUALITY.

Being the last of a series of four lee tares on Socialism delivered by Mr Bernard Shaw.

To what extent will unattractive work be necessary in a community organised on the basis of equal incomes for all? Mr. Shaw pointed out that there are certain kinds of work which we shall simplv do without in such a community —for'instance, the work of a valet or a lady's maid, and there are some peopie to whom these are an absolute necessity of life. He had himself had experience of both states. " I think there 's a great deal of work of tliat description which people will learn to do without. You will simply say: Here are cerlain things which nobody wants to do, and since nobody will be able to say that they are necessary and that peop.e cannot live without them, we shall get on without them. When you abolished capital punishment for forgery you threw a lot of executioners out of work, you confined the trade of execution to murders. The time will probably come when vou will drop that trade altogether'.'' THE MISERY OF KINGS. There are other methods of making unattractive occupations attractive to some peonle. The first is the method of honours and dignities. Of all the work from which a man would naturally be averse Mr. Shaw instanced the business of being a constitutional king as that from which a really active and intelligent man would shrink. "To be a really autocratic person who could say, 'Off with his head,' and could get it off —there might be some fun in that. But to be a constitutional king, to sit there, seeing your Ministers making the most abject "fools of themselves, meddling with everything and messing everything, and to know that you cannot speak, and that the way they do things is to advise you to do them and by putting it on to* you so that you have to go about the streets and be shot at for it! . . . . All over Europe kings are being shot at for things they are not in the least responsible for. I think it extremely likely that King George is an aident supporter of the suffrage for women, and yet he has to go about being denounced by suffragists because Mr. Asquith is against it." If we offered a constitutional kingship to any intelligent person Mr. Shaw thinks he would refuse it. Yet when a new king was wanted in the Balkans there was a competition for it, "simply because you put on a uniform and a crown and obtain a littl-3 honour and dignity." That is one method of getting disagreeable work done. HARD LABOUR FOR MR. SHAW. Another method is to give those who are asked to do very rough work—such as stoking on board ship, which Mr. Shaw said will probably be superseded before long—a short spell of work and a long holiday. Other work could be clone by giving the workers shorter hours. "Take my work, for instance. Supposing the average working day were six hours, and people wanted me to work at my job for six hours, I could not do it. I. can stick at it for 2£- hours, and then I am done. I can do ordinary business, address meetings and all that kind of amusement in my spare time, but what I call hard work, best \ym-\-, artistic work, is work I could not possibly keep doing for more than 2V to 3 hours. I can stretch it one clay if I am lazy the next, and if I go on working hard 1 want a little more complete holiday perhaps than the man who goes on doing routine work. The man who is doing routine work, work he has not got to think about, can go on working perhaps 16 hours a day for 30 years : some peonle take a pleasure in doing that just to throw it at other people's heads.'' NOT A SIMPLE PLAN.

Then Mr. Shaw came to the real point at which he intended to begin six weeks earlier, but went back because he found that the elementary education of some of his hearers had been a little neglected. He set himself to answer the question, Why do you stand on that platform talking round and round and round, when the perfectly simple plan is to pay a man more for one sort of work than another and have done? That seems the simple method, but it i; not so simple as it seems, and as it seemed after Mr. Shaw had finished with this phase of his argument. People have a curious idea that at the present time we are paying a man according to the value of his work. That is nonsense. Mr. Shaw proved it was nonsense by asking the audience to say how much he ought to have for his work, how much Sir Edward Grey, and how much the Kaiser. They would then realise how difficult it would be to arrive at the exact monetary value of the various qualities of this remarkable tiinity. There are in fact overwhelming reasons against inequality. A REASON FOR EQUALITY. The first reason against inequality is economic. The condition of economic soundness in a nation is that production must take the order of necessity. We should produce the necessary things first, and until everybody in the community is provided with these elementary things we should not waste capital and labour in producing things that onlv become valuable after these needs are met. We should begin with food and clothing and education and housing and things of that kind, and not begin to piikI tire W) h.p. motor cars and so on as long as there is a single person in tin l whole community hungry, starving, or living in insanitary conditions. If everybody had an eoual income we could keep the order of production on sound line-s. Hut if we send some men into ib" market with IS-». a week and annihov with LOW or 1.500 shillings a day (th'"*o are no fancy figures'), the labourer with soon conies to the end '.fore be has h'id enough fond, cloth-lii-r. or edii'-.itinn. R"t the Duke of Wn-:i->iinot»- li'vitie all that he want" ■mil n mv'l 't-'il more, when fho demand ■■!■ lb- lubn-i'v.r stniw rlomnnds a Q 0 h.p. nintnr <-\ r and nc > nrdin" , lv. as prodnc- ■;.,:, m .ila-VV promi-Hon-vl to effective l..nv, n ,' tW, rr,.,;i.,l •>„,' lnl.onr of the (">"•«!rv '.irn or<'n?v-'-",1 for the nroduc-

tion of SO h.p. motor cars before it is directed to fulfilling the needs of the labourer. That is the whole case. "Jt is the one overwhelming argument in favour of equality of income, that as long as we keep incomes equal, the income getting larger as the productive power (ji the community increases, the equality of purchasing power will always keep the production of wealth at the right level and in the right order." MR. SHAW AS CANDIDATE. Another reason is political. The system of equality can only be maintained if everybody has equal political power. The one reason why we cannot get equality of income at the present time is that we have not got democracy. No such thing as democracy exists on the face of the earth. "People think that democracy is a system in which there is popular election.* The very existence of popular election is a proof that there is no democracy. There is no more degraded or degrading experience on the face of the earth than going through a popular election; I have been through one on my own behalf and on behalf of friends, and it is like having a moral mud-bath. If I wanted to enter Parliament to-morrow, I, as a decent man, would get a good election agent, find out what were the expenses allowed Inlaw, and put at his disposal that sum of money. I should also, in a less direct manner, nut at his disposal perhaps L 1,000 to £",,000, and say : 'You underst.ind that I want to get in.' The intelligent election agent would say: T don't think vou will do it for that: you could do ft for /mother £2,000.' I should give him another £2,000, and come on any evening he liked and make a speech, and have nothing more to do with the beastly business; then I think I might come out a decent man. An election is an absurdity. What is the most important body which disposes of the lives and liberties of its fellow creatures? The common jury. After all, the House of Commons can only rob

JOU, it can't hang you; the common jury can hang you, and the common jury is selected in a sensible way, on the* assumption that one dozen men are very like any other dozen men, and quite arbitrarily you take them, as it were, by lot. In the case of a coroner s jury you sometimes send a policeman into the street to take the first twelve men. That is the proper way to do it. The House of Commons consists, 1 think, of about 670 members. Can anything be more absurd than to suppose that any 670 men are any different from any other 670 men 0 " WAR FOR IDEAS.

No representation is possible without equality of income. And since the object must be finally to get the most important political offices filled by the best men, we must not allow the idolatry of riches to obscure men's real value. In this way, too, we shall come to the real question of war. We must not be for markets: war must be for ideas. "It n a diabolical thing that at the present time when we really thought that we had at last got a war for an idea, a democratic idea, we have a very pitiable newspaper, owned by tradesmen with the instincts of tradesmen, coming in and talking of capturing markets and disgracing us in the eyes of the world.'' EQUALITY AND BIOLOGY. The la-t thing Mr. Shaw said was that there is a biological reason for equality. ''Our present system has produced a most abominable set of people. 1 include myself—simply as an excuse for including you. We really are abominable. I pointed out to you that owing to the system that allows us to be bought and sold as mere instruments of production we never become fully developed human beings. It we want to become that, if we want to advance, really to keen the march of evolution and become bettor human beings—not, of course, to produce that ridiculous thing, the solitary superman; for he will be no use unless other people are supermen too—if we want to get a general raising of the level of humanity there is only one wn\ —we must breed it." That means that we must do away with corrupt motives for marriage. We are not now an inter-marriageable comliiunitv. 18s. a week cannot intermarry with 21s. a week; L'ls. a week cannot intermarry with USs. a week. While that inequality persists we cannot have genuine evolution. We must have the widest possible field of sexual selection. THE FINAL SUMMARY. ''These three things," Mr. Shaw concluded, "the economic reason, the political reason, the biological reason, if you really fill them up with their full rontent, simply sweep away all the little baffling arguments in favour of inequality. Do not forget that an income is no use to a man unless he can find a class of people which enjoys that income as well as himself. For instance, take a man who has ten times the income of the rest of the community: it is clear that that man would not be able to live better than the rest of the community live. He would not find any shops or houses better than those the other people find, would not find any society except their society. And, therefore, when vou once get. a really decent level of ineome and well-being in society, people will not seek the advantage of being exceptional, because it would only make 'hem uncomfortable. You must get a '•irgc class of people enjoying similar ■nromefi in order to get any enioyment "ut of it. One final point. Do pet it out of your heads that it is a good thing

to take out certain very rare individuals, and give them a lot of money, because the result is that they have to give it back to you somehow. Already some American millionaires, like Mr. Carnegie, having a good deal more money than there is any class for them to spend it among, give it back to you in free libraries and so on. You might give a man a sort of present sometimes, like a man who wants something in the house, and gives it to his wife as a present, and gets the credit of being generous and the enjoyment of what he wanted at the same time. EQUALITY AND STRIKES. " I have now come to the end of my course of lectures. Whether you agree with me or not, I hope I have opened your eyes to the fact that you are now iiung'in a state of society which is dynamic and not static, that it is impossible for anyone to be now what is called a conservative, that society in which you are is extremely unstable, that it will not 'stay put' for a year, much less for a whole eternity or even for your lifetime. You will continually lind', for instance, with regard to the men you have got to vote for, that you have" got to decide whether you will vote for the men who advocate the common rule, raisinsr of the minimum by law, as against the people who want competition ot supply and demand. And when you come to these disagreeable conflicts—the Larkin strike, the general strike in Dublin, Lord Devonport's struggle with the Transport workers, the Colorado strike—you will have to consider whether you will vote for that state of things, or whether you will vote for the interposition of the State, of the whole community, to take the matter out of the hands of Mr. Larkin or Lord Devonport, and impartially impose a common ideal. You will always ! vote on that question, but on that vote I will depend the possibility of the realiI sation of the hopes I have been trying i to hold out."