The Transition to Social Democracy: Annie Besant
The benefits of such a change as this are so obvious to all except the existing private proprietors and their parasites, that it is very necessary to insist on the impossibility of effecting it suddenly. The young Socialist is apt to be catastrophic in his views – to plan the revolutionary programme as an affair of twenty-four lively hours, with Individualism in full swing on Monday morning, a tidal wave of the insurgent proletariat on Monday afternoon, and Socialism in complete working order on Tuesday. A man who believes that such a happy despatch is possible, will naturally think it absurd and even inhuman to stick at bloodshed in bringing it about. He can prove that the continuance of the present system for a year costs more suffering than could be crammed into any Monday afternoon, however sanguinary. This is the phase of conviction in which are delivered those Socialist speeches which make what the newspapers call “good copy”, and which are the only ones they as yet report. Such speeches are encouraged by the hasty opposition they evoke from thoughtless persons, who begin by tacitly admitting that a sudden change is feasible, and go on to protest that it would be wicked. The experienced Social Democrat converts his too ardent follower by first admitting that if the change could be made catastrophically it would be well worth making, and then proceeding to point out that as it would involve a readjustment of productive industry to meet the demand created by an entirely new distribution of purchasing power, it would also involve, in the application of labor and industrial machinery, alterations which no afternoon’s work could effect. You cannot convince any man that it is impossible to tear down a government in a day; but everybody is convinced already that you cannot convert first and third class carriages into second class; rookeries and palaces into comfortable dwellings; and jewellers and dressmakers into bakers and builders, by merely singing the “Marseillaise”. […] Demolishing a Bastille with seven prisoners in it is one thing: demolishing one with fourteen million prisoners is quite another. I need not enlarge on the point: the necessity for cautious and gradual change must be obvious to everyone here, and could be made obvious to everyone elsewhere if only the catastrophists were courageously and sensibly dealt with in discussion.
What then does a gradual transition to Social Democracy mean specifically. It means the gradual extension of the franchise; and the transfer of rent and interest to the State, not in one lump sum, but by instalments. Looked at in this way, it will at once be seen that we are already far on the road, and are being urged further by many politicians who do not dream that they are touched with Socialism – nay, who would earnestly repudiate the touch as a taint. Let us see how far we have gone. In 1832 the political power passed into the hands of the middle class; and in 1838 Lord John Russell announced finality. Meanwhile, in 1834, the middle class had swept away the last economic refuge of the workers, the old Poor Law, and delivered them naked to the furies of competition.4 Ten years turmoil and active emigration followed; and then the thin end of the wedge went in. The Income Tax was established; and the Factory Acts were made effective. The Income Tax (1842), which is on individualist principles an intolerable spoliative anomaly, is simply a forcible transfer of rent, interest, and even rent of ability, from private holders to the State without compensation. It excused itself to the Whigs on the ground that those who had most property for the State to protect should pay ad valorem for its protection. The Factory Acts swept the anarchic theory of the irresponsibility of private enterprise out of practical politics; made employers accountable to the State for the well-being of their employees; and transferred a further instalment of profits directly to the worker by raising wages. Then came the gold discoveries in California (1847) and Australia (1851), and the period of leaps and bounds, supported by the economic rent of England’s mineral fertility, which kindled Mr. Gladstone’s retrogressive instincts to a vain hope of abolishing the Income Tax. These events relieved the pressure set up by the New Poor Law. The workers rapidly organized themselves in Trades Unions, which were denounced then for their tendency to sap the manly independence which had formerly characterized the British workman,5 and which are to-day held up to him as the self-helpful perfection of that manly independence. Howbeit, self-help flourished, especially at Manchester and Sheffield; State help was voted grandmotherly; wages went up; and the Unions, like the fly on the wheel, thought that they had raised them. They were mistaken; but the value of Trade Unionism in awakening the social conscience of the skilled workers was immense, though to this there was a heavy set-off in its tendency to destroy their artistic conscience by making them aware that it was their duty to one another to discourage rapid and efficient workmanship by every means in their power. An extension of the Franchise, which was really an instalment of Democracy, and not, like the 1832 Reform Bill, only an advance towards it was gained in 1867; and immediately afterwards came another instalment of Socialism in the shape of a further transfer of rent and interest from private holders to the State for the purpose of educating the people. In the meantime, the extraordinary success of the post office, which, according to the teaching of the Manchester school, should have been a nest of incompetence and jobbery, had not only shewn the perfect efficiency of State enterprise when the officials are made responsible to the class interested in its success, but had also proved the enormous convenience and cheapness of socialistic or collectivist charges over those of private enterprise. For example, the Postmaster General charges a penny for sending a letter weighing an ounce from Kensington to Bayswater. Private enterprise would send half a pound the same distance for a farthing, and make a handsome profit on it. But the Postmaster General also sends an ounce letter from Land’s End to John O’Groat’s House for a penny. Private enterprise would probably demand at least a shilling, if not five, for such a service; and there are many places in which private enterprise could not on any terms maintain a post office. Therefore a citizen with ten letters to post saves considerably by the uniform socialistic charge, and quite recognizes the necessity for rigidly protecting the Postmaster’s monopoly.
[…]
This, then, is the humdrum programme of the practical Social Democrat to-day. There is not one new item in it. All are applications of principles already admitted, and extensions of practices already in full activity. All have on them that stamp of the vestry which is so congenial to the British mind. None of them compel the use of the words Socialism or Revolution: at no point do they involve guillotining, declaring the Rights of Man, swearing on the altar of the country, or anything else that is supposed to be essentially un-English. And they are all sure to come – landmarks on our course already visible to far-sighted politicians even of the party which dreads them.
Let me, in conclusion, disavow all admiration for this inevitable, but sordid, slow, reluctant, cowardly path to justice. I venture to claim your respect for those enthusiasts who still refuse to believe that millions of their fellow creatures must be left to sweat and suffer in hopeless toil and degradation, while parliaments and vestries grudgingly muddle and grope towards paltry instalments of betterment. The right is so clear, the wrong so intolerable, the gospel so convincing, that it seems to them that it must be possible to enlist the whole body of workers – soldiers, policemen, and all – under the banner of brotherhood and equality; and at one great stroke to set Justice on her rightful throne. Unfortunately, such an army of light is no more to be gathered from the human product of nineteenth century civilization than grapes are to be gathered from thistles. But if we feel glad of that impossibility; if we feel relieved that the change is to be slow enough to avert personal risk to ourselves; if we feel anything less than acute disappointment and bitter humiliation at the discovery that there is yet between us and the promised land a wilderness in which many must perish miserably of want and despair: then I submit to you that our institutions have corrupted us to the most dastardly degree of selfishness. The Socialists need not be ashamed of beginning as they did by proposing militant organization of t
he working classes and general insurrection. The proposal proved impracticable; and it has now been abandoned – not without some outspoken regrets – by English Socialists. But it still remains as the only finally possible alternative to the Social Democratic programme ….
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Shaw’s more than twenty plays written between 1885 and 1920 cover a wide variety of topics. In addition to rack renting (Widowers’ Houses), these include eugenics and his idiosyncratic concept of evolution (Man and Superman), colonialism (John Bull’s Other Island), religion and arms-manufacture (Major Barbara), and medical ethics (The Doctor’s Dilemma). However, the most consistent issue, which is also subsumed in plays where the major focus is on a different subject, relates to the position and status of women. The figure of the “New Woman” recurs in several plays, particularly The Philanderer (1893), Man and Superman (1903), Misalliance (1910) – while part of The Quintessence of Ibsenism is an attack on the “Womanly Woman”, the conventional ideal of feminine behavior “that a vocation for domestic management and the care of children is natural to women”:
If we have come to think that the nursery and the kitchen are the natural sphere of a woman, we have done so exactly as English children come to think that a cage is the natural sphere of a parrot – because they have never seen one anywhere else. No doubt there are Philistine parrots who agree with their owners that it is better to be in a cage than out, so long as there is plenty of hempseed and indian corn there. There may even be idealist parrots who persuade themselves that the mission of a parrot is to minister to the happiness of a private family by whistling and saying “Pretty Polly,” and that it is in the sacrifice of its liberty to this altruistic pursuit that a true parrot finds the supreme satisfaction of its soul … Still, the only parrot a free-souled person can sympathize with is the one that insists on its being let out as the first condition of making itself agreeable …
The sum of the matter is that unless Woman repudiates her womanliness, her duty to her husband, to her children, to society, to the law and to everyone but herself, she cannot emancipate herself.
Candida (1894) is a conscious variation on A Doll’s House; Getting Married is a “disquisition” on laws governing marriage. But the point where the case against patriarchy and the battle for women’s rights finds its sharpest form is in prostitution, the major theme of Mrs Warren’s Profession.
Prostitution had been a recurrent issue of public concern in England during the latter part of the nineteenth century; and in the 1880s legislation, which previously had largely been concerned with control of communicable disease, was passed summarily banning brothels and criminalizing both prostitutes and their male customers. The catalyst for this triumph of moral puritanism was a campaign by the Quaker activist Alfred Dyer, who began investigating “white slavery” in Brussels in 1879. As publisher of a newspaper, The Sentinel, he was able to broadcast his findings. He also issued a pamphlet on “the foreign slave traffic in English girls” that focussed on “the system of slavery, which this traffic exists to supply with victims” (The European Slave Trade in English Girls, 1880), and was one of the principal signatories to a memorial presented to the Foreign Secretary in August 1880.
As a direct result, a Select Committee of Parliament was set up “to inquire into the state of the law relative to the protection of young girls”. The scale of the problem in Britain, and the perceived need for legal regulation are well illustrated by the evidence given to this Committee by Howard Vincent, Director of the Criminal Investigation Department for the Metropolitan Police. The outcome of the inquiry was a series of provisions culminating in The Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, “An Act to make further provision for the protection of women and girls, the suppression of brothels, and other purposes” that set the tone of repressive morality, for which Victorian society became known. A “National Vigilance Association of men and women for the enforcement and improvement of the laws for the repression of vice and public immorality” was founded, bringing together the Society for the Suppression of Vice, the Minors’ Protection Society, the Belgian Traffic Committee and the Central Vigilance Society. This organization attracted a huge demonstration in Hyde Park of between 100,000 and a quarter million people in August 1885, and set up local volunteer Vigilance Associations with the aim of initiating prosecutions for
(1) the corruption and prostitution of girls under sixteen; (2) the abduction of girls under eighteen; (3) the procuration of the seduction of girls under twenty-one; (4) the fraudulent seduction of women of any age; (5) the entrapping or enveigling of girls or women into brothels; (6) the procuring of women for foreign brothels; and (7) the detention of women in houses of ill-fame.
(The Sentinel, February 1886)
Further legislation was passed over the remaining years of Queen Victoria’s reign, such as the 1898 Act to Amend the Vagrancy Act, specifically aimed at male pimps.
Prostitution continued of course, and with an average of 1,200 prosecutions of “bawdy houses” a year between 1885 and 1914 – as against an average of 86 before the Act – prostitutes were driven into the streets of slums like Whitechapel (where they became the prey of the Jack the Ripper murders in 1888). The attitude of proponents of women’s rights to this moral reform was ambiguous. However, the connection between prostitution and slavery was not missed by the suffragette movement, who adopted it as an emblem of women’s subjugation to men. Its extension and parallel to women’s status in marriage has become a cliché of contemporary feminism – as Germaine Greer put it in the programme essay for a modern revival of Mrs Warren’s Profession, “Marriage itself is legalized prostitution, for legitimate sex is as frequently deployed for advantage as any other sort. The wife who is trained as laboriously as any Geisha in the arts of keeping her husband, and keeping him contented and successful, is a sanctified whore” (“A Whore in Every Home” National Theatre, 1985). But the same point was already being made by the American political activist, Emma Goldman, in 1917. Her pamphlet, The Traffic in Women, also makes the connection between prostitution and Capitalism, and cites Shaw’s play as support for her argument.
6.1.2 The European Slave Trade in English girls – Memorial to the Foreign Secretary, 1880
Alfred S. Dyer and others
The following Memorial (with Declarations in corroboration) has been laid before Earl Granville by the London Committee […],
To the Right Honourable the Earl Granville, KG, Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.
The memorial of the undersigned members of a Committee, formed in London for the purpose of exposing and suppressing the existing traffic in English, Scotch, and Irish Girls, for the Purpose of Foreign Prostitution,
Respectfully sheweth:
That there exists a system of systematic abduction, to Brussels and elsewhere on the Continent, of girls who are British subjects, for purposes of prostitution, and that the girls so abducted, being sold to the keepers of licensed houses of infamy, are generally confined and detained against their will in such houses.
Many of the girls so abducted are induced by men of respectable exterior to go abroad under promise of marriage or of obtaining employment or situations; and, on arrival there are taken to the office of the Police des Moeurs [Vice Police] for registration as prostitutes.
In most cases, the girls know nothing of the language or customs of the country, and are entirely ignorant of the system of registration of prostitutes which exists on the Continent, and of what is being transacted at the office aforesaid; and, before being taken there, they are often made to believe that the place is the Custom House, and that they are going there to comply with formalities required from travellers who arrive there from another country, and they are generally registered for reasons that are hereinafter stated, in false names.
According to the letter of the Belgian law, a woman may not be registered as a prostitute under the age of twenty-one years, but this legal rule is easily and most frequently evaded, for
the purpose of securing young victims, by the following means: Any certificate of birth can be obtained in England, by any person whomsoever, on payment of a few shillings. The abductor, therefore, produces a true certificate of the birth of some female who has attained twenty-one years, and presents such certificate to the Police des Moeurs as that of the girl’s who is under age, and whom he wishes to register […]
After a girl has been registered (with or without her knowledge or consent), and immured in a licensed house of prostitution, it is, in most cases, impossible for her to regain her freedom […] The houses are constructed so as to prevent egress without the concurrence of the keepers thereof. Terrorism is also exercised over these girls, if any wish or attempt to escape is manifest; they are subjected to violence, and are intimidated by threats of the imprisonment to which they have become liable through being registered in a false name. They are also invariably kept in debt to the keepers of the tolerated houses, and these persons frequently sell the miserable girls from one house to another, that traces of them may be lost or rendered difficult […]
A Sourcebook on Naturalist Theatre Page 28
