Of course they will get their demands. Striking, with “peaceful picketing,” generally gets its way, even if not backed up by Government emissaries and the glorious visions flash-lighted by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. But what will be the result? Half the amount of employment on the estates of those who can still afford to keep them, and no all-the-year-round engagements. When the work is slack the over-paid and inimical labourer will naturally be discharged. We say inimical, for how can friendly relations be maintained if the old solidarity is destroyed? This, of course, is what is aimed at; and the quack remedy, the patent pill alluringly held aloft, is—State ownership of land! The land is to be managed like the Workhouse, the Prison, and the Reformatory, of which, we are all aware, the British State makes such a brilliant success. We know how the poor love the Workhouse, and how happy they are in it; yet one can scarcely take up a police report without finding some desperate pauper sentenced for revolt. Oh, no doubt it will be a Merry England when these disinterested and dashing tinkers get their way.
We have known, in parenthesis, a pauper establishment, run by voluntary effort, in which a hundred and fifty old men and ninety old women were kept happy and contented by a handful of soft-voiced nuns. No need to call in the policeman, in Portobello Road; for there old age is reverenced at once and pitied, and the double aspect of the most natural of all the commandments is put into every-day practice, so unobtrusively and simply that no one can guess how heroically.
But the religious question will soon be treated in the same way as the land question; so no invidious comparisons need be drawn. Little boys and little girls are to be taught that the State is henceforth to take the place of God in their infant minds. How comfortable and warm a creed! How it will strengthen their character for living, and ease the thoughts of the dying. There is no God: but there is a Chancellor of the Exchequer and a dashing gentleman at the Home Office. You have not been created or redeemed, little boy! We have no prayers to teach you. There are no divine commandments which you need obey—naturally, since there is no Divine Father. There are no sacraments to sustain and elevate your soul—for little boys and girls have no souls! But cheer ye: you were evolved by a natural process, and the State is here to cradle and instruct you and to make life beautiful for you. Behold, dear children, the Book of the Laws. These laws which you are bound to keep—unless, of course, you go on strike, become a Suffragette, or organize political vote catching. And this is a picture of a Jail for people who are so blind as to refuse Insurance blessings; behold that inspired countenance. That is the head of the Government! And for Sunday amusements there is the Cinema—the Crippen case, dear children; the Houndsditch Burglary and the Train Smash.... And when the new theories have developed and matured, there will be no such thing as private property in anything to constrain the free mind of emancipated man—A house of your own, a wife to yourself!—fie!