The Servile State by Hilaire Belloc (books under 200 pages .txt) 📕

to be substituted the dreadful moral anarchy against which all moral effort is now turned, and which goes by the name of “capitalism.”

How did such a catastrophe come about? Why was it permitted, and upon what historical process did the evil batten? What turned an England economically free into the England which we know today, of which at least one-third is indigent, of which nineteen-twentieths are dispossessed of capital and of land, and of which the whole industry and national life is controlled upon its economic side by a few chance directors of millions, a few masters of unsocial and irresponsible monopolies?

The answer most usually given to this fundamental question in our history, and the one most readily accepted, is that this misfortune came about through a material process known as the “Industrial Revolution.” The use of expensive machinery, the concentration of industry and of its implements are imagined to have enslaved, in some blind way, apart from the human will, the action of English mankind.

The explanation is wholly false. No such material cause determined the degradation from which we suffer.

It was the deliberate action of men, evil will in a few and apathy of will among the many, which produced a catastrophe as human in its causes and inception as in its vile effect.

Capitalism was not the growth of the industrial movement, nor of chance material discoveries. A little acquaintance with history and a little straightforwardness in the teaching of it would be enough to prove that.

The industrial system was a growth proceeding from capitalism, not its cause. Capitalism was here in England before the industrial system came into being;⁠—before the use of coal and of the new expensive machinery, and of the concentration of the implements of production in the great towns. Had capitalism not been present before the Industrial Revolution, that revolution might have proved as beneficent to Englishmen as it has proved maleficent. But capitalism⁠—that is, the ownership by a few of the springs of life⁠—was present long before the great discoveries came. It warped the effect of these discoveries and new inventions, and it turned them from a good into an evil thing. It was not machinery that lost us our freedom; it was the loss of a free mind.

IV How the Distributive State Failed

This failure original in England⁠—The story of the decline from distributive property to capitalism⁠—The economic revolution of the sixteenth century⁠—The confiscation of monastic land⁠—What might have happened had the state retained it⁠—As a fact that land is captured by an oligarchy⁠—England is capitalist before the advent of the industrial revolution⁠—Therefore modern industry, proceeding from England, has grown in a capitalist mould.

With the close of the middle ages the societies of Western Christendom and England among the rest were economically free.

Property was an institution native to the state and enjoyed by the great mass of its citizens. Cooperative institutions, voluntary regulations of labour, restricted the completely independent use of property by its owners only in order to keep that institution intact and to prevent the absorption of small property by great.

This excellent state of affairs which we had reached after many centuries of Christian development, and in which the old institution of slavery had been finally eliminated from Christendom, did not everywhere survive. In England in particular it was ruined. The seeds of the disaster were sown in the sixteenth century. Its first apparent effects came to light in the seventeenth. During the eighteenth century England came to be finally, though insecurely, established upon a proletarian basis, that is, it had already become a society of rich men possessed of the means of production on the one hand, and a majority dispossessed of those means upon the other. With the nineteenth century the evil plant had come to its maturity, and England had become before the close of that period a purely capitalist state, the type and model of capitalism for the whole world: with the means of production tightly held by a very small group of citizens, and the whole determining mass of the nation dispossessed of capital and land, and dispossessed, therefore, in all cases of security, and in many of sufficiency as well. The mass of Englishmen, still possessed of political, lacked more and more the elements of economic, freedom, and were in a worse posture than free citizens have ever found themselves before in the history of Europe.

By what steps did so enormous a catastrophe fall upon us?

The first step in the process consisted in the mishandling of a great economic revolution which marked the sixteenth century. The lands and the accumulated wealth of the monasteries were taken out of, the hands of their old possessors with the intention of vesting them in the Crown⁠—but they passed, as a fact, not into the hands of the Crown, but into the hands of an already wealthy section of the community who, after the change was complete, became in the succeeding hundred years the governing power of England.

This is what happened:⁠—

The England of the early sixteenth century, the England over which Henry VIII inherited his powerful Crown in youth, though it was an England in which the great mass of men owned the land they tilled and the houses in which they dwelt, and the implements with which they worked, was yet an England in which these goods, though widely distributed, were distributed unequally.

Then, as now, the soil and its fixtures were the basis of all wealth, but the proportion between the value of the soil and its fixtures and the value of other means of production (implements, stores of clothing and of subsistence, etc.) was different from what it is now. The land and the fixtures upon it formed a very much larger fraction of the totality of the means of production than they do today. They represent today not one-half the total means of production of this country, and though they are the necessary foundation for all wealth production, yet