Читать книгу The Greatest Analytical Studies of Hilaire Belloc - Hilaire Belloc - Страница 17

1. Save in this special sense of “Collectivist,” the word “Socialist” has either no clear meaning, or is used synonymously with other older and better-known words.

2. The purchasing power of money fell during this century to about a third of its original standard. £3 (say) would purchase under Charles I the necessities which £1 would have purchased under Henry VIII. Nearly all the receipts of the Crown were customary. Most of its expenses were competitive. It continued to get but £1 where it was gradually compelled to pay out £3.

3. Before any trust is established in this country, the first step is to “interest” one of our politicians. The Telephones, the South Wales Coal Trust, the happily defeated Soap Trust, the Soda, Fish, and Fruit Trusts, are examples in point.

4. By which word “property” is meant, of course, property in the means of Production.

5. That this is an illusion I shall attempt to show on a later page.

6. By an illusion which clever statesmanship could use to the advantage of the community, he even estimates the natural forces he controls (which need no accumulation, but are always present) on the analogy of his capital, and will part with them at “so many years’ purchase.” It is by taking advantage of this illusion that land purchase schemes (as in Ireland) happily work to the advantage of the dispossessed.

7. Thus you can raid the brewers in a society half-Puritan where brewing is thought immoral by many, but proceed to railway stock and it will be a very different matter.

8. In using this metaphor I at once record my apologies to those who believe in elliptical and hyperbolic universes, and confess myself an old-fashioned parabolist. Further, I admit that the triangles in question are spherical.

9. Thus the money levied upon the death of some not very wealthy squire and represented by, say, locomotives in the Argentine, turns into two miles of palings for the pleasant back gardens of a thousand new officials under the Inebriates Bill, or is simply handed over to the shareholders of the Prudential under the Insurance Act. In the first case the locomotives have been given back to the Argentine, and after a long series of exchanges have been bartered against a great number of wood-palings from the Baltic not exactly reproductive wealth. In the second case the locomotives which used to be the squire’s hands become, or their equivalent becomes, means of production in the hands of the Sassoons.

10. How true it is that the idea of status underlies this legislation can easily be tested by taking parallel cases, in one of which working men are concerned, in the other the professional class. If I contract to write for a publisher a complete History of the County of Rutland, and in the pursuit of that task, while examining some object of historical interest, fall down a pit, I should not be able to recover against the publisher. But if I dress in mean clothes, and the same publisher, deceived, gives me a month’s work at cleaning out his ornamental water and I am wounded in that occupation by a fierce fish, he will be mulcted to my advantage, and that roundly.

11. But it has twice been brought forward in due process as a Bill in Parliament!