The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

No one had any right to condemn him for this, because all who live under the present system practise selfishness, more or less. We must be selfish: the System demands it. We must be selfish or we shall be hungry and ragged and finally die in the gutter. The more selfish we are the better off we shall be. In the ‘Battle of Life’ only the selfish and cunning are able to survive: all others are beaten down and trampled under foot. No one can justly be blamed for acting selfishly – it is a matter of self-preservation – we must either injure or be injured. It is the system that deserves to be blamed. What those who wish to perpetuate the system deserve is another question.

Crass, remembering the cutting from the Obscurer that he had in his pocket, was secretly very pleased at the turn the conversation was taking. He turned roughly on Owen:

‘The other day, when we was talkin’ about the cause of poverty, you contradicted everybody. Everyone else was wrong! But you yourself couldn’t tell us what’s the cause of poverty, could you?’

‘I think I could!’

‘Oh, of course, you think you know,’ sneered Crass, ‘and of course you think your opinion’s right and everybody else’s is wrong!

‘Yes,’ replied Owen.

Several men expressed their abhorrence of this intolerant attitude of Owen’s, but the latter rejoined:

‘Of course I think that my opinions are right and that everyone who differs from me is wrong. If I didn’t think their opinions were wrong I wouldn’t differ from them. If I didn’t think my own opinions right I wouldn’t hold them.’

‘But there’s no need to keep on arguin’ about it day after day,’ said Crass. You’ve got your opinion and I’ve got mine. Let everyone enjoy his own opinion, I say!

A murmur of approbation from the crowd greeted these sentiments; but Owen rejoined:

But we can’t both be right; if your opinions are right and mine are not, how am I to find out the truth if we never talk about them?’

‘Well, wot do you reckon is the cause of poverty, then?’ demanded Easton.

‘The present system-competition-capitalism.’

‘It’s all very well to talk like that,’ snarled Crass, to whom this statement conveyed no meaning whatever. ‘But ‘ow do you make it out?’

‘Well, I put it like that for the sake of shortness,’ replied Owen. ‘Suppose some people were living in a house—’

‘More supposin’!’ sneered Crass.

‘And suppose they were always ill, and suppose that the house was badly built, the walls so constructed that they drew and retained moisture, the roof broken and leaky, the drains defective, the doors and windows ill-fitting and the rooms badly shaped and draughty. If you were asked to name, in a word, the cause of the ill-health of the people who lived there you would say – the house. All the tinkering in the world would not make that house fit to live in; the only thing to do with it would be to pull it down and build another. Well, we’re all living in a house called the Money System; and as a result most of us are suffering from a disease called poverty. There’s so much the matter with the present system that it’s no good tinkering at it. Everything about it is wrong and there’s nothing about it that’s right. There’s only one thing to be done with it and that is to smash it up and have a different system altogether. We must get out of it.’

‘It seems to me that that’s just what you’re trying to do,’ remanded Harlow, sarcastically. ‘You seem to be tryin’ to get out of answering the question what Easton asked you!’

‘Yes!’ cried Crass, fiercely. ‘Why don’t you answer the bloody question? Wot’s the cause of poverty?’

‘What the ‘ell’s the matter with the present system?’ demanded Sawkins.

‘Ow’s it goin’ to be altered?’ said Newman.

‘Wot the bloody ‘ell sort of a system do YOU think we ought to ‘ave?’ shouted the man behind the moat.

‘It can’t never be altered,’ said Philpot. ‘Human nature’s human nature and you can’t get away from it.’

‘Never mind about human nature,’ shouted Crass. ‘Stick to the point. Wot’s the cause of poverty?’

‘Oh, b–r the cause of poverty!’ said one of the new hands. ‘I’ve ‘ad enough of this bloody row.’ And he stood up and prepared to go out of the room.

This individual had two patches on the seat of his trousers and the bottoms of the legs of that garment were frayed and ragged. He had been out of work for about six weeks previous to having been taken on by Rushton & Co. During most of that time he and his family had been existing in a condition of semi-starvation on the earnings of his wife as a charwoman and on the scraps of food she brought home from the houses where she worked. But all the same, the question of what is the cause of poverty had no interest for him.

‘There are many causes,’ answered Owen, ‘but they are all part of and inseparable from the system. In order to do away with poverty we must destroy the causes: to do away with the causes we must destroy the whole system!’

‘What are the causes, then?’

‘Well, money, for one thing!’

This extraordinary assertion was greeted with a roar of merriment, in the midst of which Philpot was heard to say that to listen to Owen was as good as going to a circus. Money was the cause of poverty!

‘I always thought it was the want of it!’ said the man with the patches on the seat of his trousers as he passed out of the door.

‘Other things,’ continued Owen, ‘are private ownership of land, private ownership of railways, tramways, gasworks, waterworks, private ownership of factories, and the other means of producing the necessaries and comforts of life. Competition in business—’

‘But ‘ow do you make it out?’ demanded Crass, impatiently.

Owen hesitated. To his mind the thing appeared very clear and simple. The causes of poverty were so glaringly evident that he marvelled that any rational being should fail to perceive them; but at the same time he found it very difficult to define them himself. He could not think of words that would convey his thoughts clearly to these others who seemed so hostile and unwilling to understand, and who appeared to have made up their minds to oppose and reject whatever he said. They did not know what were the causes of poverty and apparently they did not WANT to know.

‘Well, I’ll try to show you one of the causes,’ he said nervously at last.

He picked up a piece of charred wood that had fallen from the fire and knelt down and began to draw upon the floor. Most of the others regarded him, with looks in which an indulgent, contemptuous kind of interest mingled with an air of superiority and patronage. There was no doubt, they thought, that Owen was a clever sort of chap: his work proved that: but he was certainly a little bit mad.

‘Number three [a part of a conversation the character Owen leads about poverty and the system(s) that allow it] stands for those who work for wages or salaries, doing unnecessary work. That is, producing things or doing things which-though useful and necessary to the Imbecile System-cannot be described as the necessaries of life or the benefits of civilisation. This is the largest section of all. It comprises Commercial Travellers, Canvassers, Insurance agents, commission agents, the great number of Shop Assistants, the majority of clerks, workmen employed in the construction and adornment of business premises, people occupied with what they call “Business”, which means being very busy without producing anything. Then there is a vast army of people engaged in designing, composing, painting or printing advertisements, things which are for the most part of no utility whatever, the object of most advertisements is merely to persuade people to buy from one firm rather than from another. If you want some butter it doesn’t matter whether you buy it from Brown or Jones or Robinson.’

During the delivery of this part of the lecture, the audience began to manifest symptoms of impatience and dissent. Perceiving this, Owen, speaking very rapidly, continued:

‘If you go down town, you will see half a dozen drapers’ shops within a stone’s-throw of each other – often even next door to each other – all selling the same things. You can’t possibly think that all those shops are really necessary? You know that one of them would serve the purpose for which they are all intended – to store and serve as a centre for the distribution of the things that are made by work. If you will admit that five out of the six shops are not really necessary, you must also admit that the men who built them, and the salesmen and women or other assistants engaged in them, and the men who design and write and print their advertise-
ments are all doing unnecessary work; all really wasting their time and labour, time and labour that might be employed in helping to produce these things that we are at present short of. You must admit that none of these people are engaged in producing either the necessaries of life or the benefits of civilization. They buy them, and sell them, and handle them, and haggle over, them, and display them, in the plate glass windows of “Stores” and “Emporiums” and make profit out of them, and use them, but these people themselves produce nothing that is necessary to life or happiness, and the things that some of them do produce are only necessary to the present imbecile system.’

‘What the ‘ell sort of a bloody system do you think we ought to ‘ave, then?’ interrupted the man on the pail.

[...]

‘Well, that’s not what we’re talking about now, is it?’ replied Owen. ‘At present we’re only trying to find out how it is that there is not sufficient produced for everyone to have enough of the things that are made by work. [...]’

[...]

‘Even if there is more shops than what’s actually necessary,’ cried Harlow, ‘it all helps people to get a livin’! If half of
‘em was shut up, it would just mean that all them what works there would be out of a job. Live and let live, I say: all these things makes work.’

‘’Ear, ’ear,’ shouted the man behind the moat.

‘Yes, I know it makes “work”,’ replied Owen, ‘but we can’t live on mere “work”, you know. To live in comfort we need a sufficiency of the things that can be made by work. A man might work very hard and yet be wasting his time if he were not producing something necessary or useful.

‘Why are there so many shops and stores and emporiums? Do you imagine they exist for the purpose of giving those who build them, or work in them, a chance to earn a living? Nothing of the sort. They are carried on, and exorbitant prices are charged for the articles they sell, to enable the proprietors to amass fortunes, and to pay extortionate rents to the landlords. That is why the wages and salaries of nearly all those who do the work created by these businesses are cut down to the lowest possible point.’

[...]

‘The workers produce Everything! If you walk through the streets of a town or a city, and look around, Everything that you can see – Factories, Machinery, Houses, Railways, Tramways, Canals, Furniture, Clothing, Food and the very road or pavement you stand upon were all made by the working class, who spend all their wages in buying back only a very small part of the things they produce. Therefore what remains in the possession of their masters represents the difference between the value of the work done and the wages paid for doing it. This systematic robbery has been going on for generations, the value of the accumulated loot is enormous, and all of it, all the wealth at present in the possession of the rich, is rightly the property of the working class-it has been stolen from them by means of the Money Trick.’