“What, then,” he asked me, “are we going to do?”
“That,” I said, “is what I have come here this afternoon to learn.”
He emitted a snort of disgust. “But we must do something.” And for the first time one of the four flappers spoke: “We’ve got,” she said, “to justify our existence.”
That is rather what we were in 1919: a number of persons walking about with a pocket full of stones, wondering which window to smash. In the end we found the stones weighed rather heavily and hurt our thighs and spoilt our clothes, and we dropped them on the pavement. It is easy enough to evolve plans of international brotherhood when the Government feeds and boards and clothes you and gives you some twenty-five pounds pocket-money a month. It is less easy when you have to earn your own living. Questions of international policy seemed less important when the morning post brought a yellow form with scarlet letters across the top: “Third and final application.” During the war our liabilities had been those of many million others. In 1919 we entered the glass case of our private lives. We reassumed the habit of our own troubles and our own problems; we became again what Gilbert Frankau describes as the “possessive and predatory male.”
But I doubt even if there had been some employment for it, whether that particular enthusiasm would have survived very long the return to peace conditions. We were only sympathetic to the Communists because their views on the war tallied with our own. We should have soon realised how wide is the divergence between their interests and ours. For Communism is, or so it would seem to me, a sort of insurance policy taken out by the routine worker against the creative worker. The routine worker, the man who knocks nails into the soles of boots, who adds up columns of figures in a ledger, who pushes a trolley up a slope, who does tolerably well a thing that some fifty thousand other people could do equally well if they so chose, is protecting himself against the ingenuity that contrives a machine that will take the place of twenty such as he. He plays for safety. He enters a business as office boy; licks the backs of stamps; he passes into the counting-house and sits on a high stool. He makes no blots in his ledgers, and puts the right invoices in the right envelopes. He is allotted a room to himself and becomes a junior manager. At the age of forty-five he is drawing a salary of £450 a year. At the age of sixty-six he is given a pension in return for faithful service. He knows his limitations. He accepts and fulfils orders. Of himself he produces nothing. He knows that anyone else could do his job as well as he can. He retains his position through industry and punctuality. He appeals to the humanity of his directors. He hopes in time to fill, in his firm, much the same position as a butler in a baronial establishment. He has weathered many storms. He has become an institution. But because he knows his limitations he is frightened, frightened of the ravages of creative business, the amalgamations of one firm with another firm, the hard, purposeful nature of young blood, of the introduction of new ideas. He knows that, after a certain age, he has no value in the open market. And so he would limit the scope of private enterprise. He would prevent big men from launching schemes whose failure will involve thousands in disaster. The State must supervise and guarantee big business. It must control the avenues of precarious livelihood. It is not envy of the rich that drives the routine worker to Communism. As long as he is paid an adequate and steady wage he does not mind what money his employer makes or loses. But he knows as long as there is big business, as long as tigers hunt and are hunted in the high jungle of finance, so long will markets rise and fall, and so long will there be slumps and crashes and a cutting of staffs and wages; so long will the law of demand and supply be operative. Communism is the armour of the feeble against the adventurous; of safety against daring.