H. G. Wells

“ The whole system has to be changed, if we are to get rid of the masses of dull poverty that render our present state detestable to any sensitive man or woman. That, and no less, is the aim of all sincere Socialists: the establishment of a new and better order of society by the abolition of private property in land, in natural productions, and in their exploitation—a change as profound as the abolition of private property in slaves would have been in ancient Rome or Athens. ”

“ Is 34there no other way of managing things than to let these property-owners exact their claims, and squeeze comfort, pride, happiness, out of the lives of the common run of people? Because, of course, it is not only the boots they squeeze into meanness and badness. It is the claim and profit of the land-owner and house-owner that make our houses so ugly, shabby, and dear, that make our roadways and railways so crowded and inconvenient, that sweat our schools, our clothing, our food—boots we took merely by way of one example of a universal trouble. ”

“ The theory of Socialism, so far as English people are concerned, seems to have got up into the clouds, and its practice down into the drains; and it is well to warn inquiring men, that neither the epigram above nor the job beneath are more than the accidental accompaniments of Socialism. Socialism is a very large, but a plain, honest, and human enterprise; its ends are to be obtained neither by wit nor cunning, but by outspoken resolve, by the self-abnegation, the enthusiasm, and the loyal cooperation of great masses of people. ”

“ You may say, if you choose, that property-owners, land-owners for example, must be bought out and not robbed; but since getting the money to buy them out involves taxing the property of some one else, who may possibly have a better claim to it than the land-owner to his, I don’t quite see where the honesty of that course comes in. You can only give property for property in buying and selling; and if private property is not robbery, then not only Socialism but ordinary taxation must be. ”

“ Obviously to give our best energies to making other people Socialists, to organising ourselves with all other Socialists, irrespective of class or the minor details of creed, and to making ourselves audible, visible, effectual as Socialists, wherever and whenever we can.
We have to think about Socialism, read about it, discuss it; so that we may be assured and clear and persuasive about it. We have to confess our faith openly and frequently. We must refuse to be called Liberal or Conservative, Republican or Democrat, or any of those ambiguous things. ”

“ Much more likely to obstruct the way to Socialism is the ignorance, the want of courage, the stupid want of imagination of the very poor, too shy and timid and clumsy to face any change they can evade! But, even with them, popular education is doing its work; and I do not fear but that in the next generation we shall find Socialists even in the slums. 45The unimaginative person who owns some little bit of property, an acre or so of freehold land, or a hundred pounds in the savings bank, will no doubt be the most tenacious passive resister to Socialistic ideas ”

“ The idea that anything and everything may be claimed as private property belongs to the dark ages of the world; and it is not only a monstrous injustice, but a still more monstrous inconvenience. 38Suppose we still admitted private property in high roads, and let every man who had a scrap of high road haggle a bargain with us before we could drive by in a cab! You say life would be unendurable. But indeed it amounts to something a little like that if we use a railway now; and it is quite like that if one wants a spot of ground somewhere upon which one may live. ”

“ I said; “these miseries of boots are no more than a sample. The clothes people wear are no better than their boots; and the houses they live in far worse. And think of the shoddy garment of ideas and misconceptions and partial statements into which their poor minds have been jammed by way of education! Think of the way that pinches and chafes them! If one expanded the miseries of these things.... Think, for example, of the results of the poor, bad, unwise food, of badly-managed eyes and ears and teeth! Think of the quantity of toothache.” ”

“ But if taxation is a justifiable proceeding, if you can tax me (as I am taxed) for public services, a shilling and more out of every twenty shillings I earn, then I do not see why you should not put a tax upon the land-owner if you want to do so, of a half or two thirds or all his land, or upon the railway share-holder of 41ten or fifteen or twenty shillings in the pound on his shares. In every change some one has to bear the brunt; every improvement in machinery and industrial organisation deprives some poor people of an income ”

“ It is perfectly true that every one cannot have the best of things; and it is in the nature of things that some boots should be better and some worse. To some people, either by sheer good luck, or through the strength of their determination to have them, the exquisitely good boots, those of the finest leather and the most artistic cut, will fall. I have never denied that. Nobody dreams of a time when every one will have exactly as good boots as every one else ”

“ And you will perhaps not think me fanciful and extravagant when I confess that when I realise this, and look at poor people’s boots in the street, and see them cracked and misshapen and altogether nasty, I seem to see also a lot of little phantom land-owners, cattle-owners, house-owners, owners of all sorts, swarming over their pinched and weary feet like leeches, taking much and giving nothing, and being the real cause of all such miseries. ”

“ The mean and timid elements in “human nature” are, and will be, I admit, against Socialism; but they are not all “human nature,” not half human nature. And when, in the whole history of the world, have meanness and timidity won a struggle? ”

“ He believes he would be happier and more comfortable in a Socialistic state of affairs, when it would not be necessary for him to hold on to that life-belt of invested property. He finds it—and quite a lot of well-off people are quite of his way of thinking—a constant flaw upon a life of comfort and pleasant interests to see so many people, who might be his agreeable friends and associates, detestably under-educated, detestably housed, in the most detestable clothes and boots, and so detestably broken in spirit that they will not treat him as an equal. ”

“ There are, no doubt, a number of dull, base, rich people who hate and dread Socialism for purely selfish reasons; but it is quite possible to be a property owner and yet be anxious to see Socialism come to its own.
For example, the man whose private affairs I know best in the world, the second friend I named, the owner of all those comfortable boots, gives time and 43energy and money to further this hope of Socialism, although he pays income tax on twelve hundred a year, and has shares and property to the value of some thousands of pounds. ”

“ Most people have to buy ready-made boots; they cannot afford others, and, in the submissive philosophy of poverty, they wear them to “get used” to them. This gives you the little-toe pinch, the big-toe pinch, the squeeze and swelling across the foot; and, as a sort of chronic development of these pressures, come corns and all the misery of corns. Children’s feet get distorted for good by this method of fitting 10the human being to the thing; and a vast number of people in the world are, as a consequence of this, ashamed to appear barefooted. ”

“ There is enough good leather in the world to make good sightly boots and shoes for all who need them, enough men at leisure and enough power and machinery to do all the work required, enough unemployed intelligence to organise the shoemaking and shoe distribution for everybody. ”

“ If your wife catches a bad cold because her boots are too thin for the time of the year, or dislikes going out because she cuts a shabby ugly figure, if your children look painfully nasty because their faces are swollen with toothache, or because their clothes are dirty, old, and ill-fitting, if you are all dull and disposed to be cross with one another for want of decent amusement and change of air—don’t submit, don’t be humbugged for a moment into 23believing that this is the dingy lot of all mankind. Those people you love are living in a badly-managed world and on the wrong side of it ”

“ Well, there are a number of people who say there is a better way and that the world could be made infinitely better in all these matters, made happier and better than it ever has been in these respects, by refusing to have private property in all 35these universally necessary things. They say that it is possible to have the land administered, and such common and needful things as leather produced, and boots manufactured, and no end of other such generally necessary services carried on, not for the private profit of individuals, but for the good of all. ”

“ So far as the question of method goes it is quite conceivable that we may partially compensate the property owners and make all sorts of mitigating arrangements to avoid cruelty to them in our attempt to end the wider cruelties of to-day.
But, apart from the justice of the case, many people seem to regard Socialism as a hopeless dream, because, as they put 42it, “it is against human nature.” Every one with any scrap of property in land, or shares, or what not, they tell us, will be bitterly opposed to the coming of Socialism ”

“ If you demand less than that, if you are not prepared to struggle for that, you are not 50really a Socialist. If you funk that, then you must make up your mind to square your life to a sort of personal and private happiness with things as they are, and decide with my other friend that “it doesn’t do to think about boots.”
It is well to insist upon one central idea. Socialism is a common-sense, matter-of-fact proposal to change our conventional admission of what is or is not property, and to re-arrange the world according to these revised conceptions. ”

“ Here on the one hand—you can see for yourself in any unfashionable part of Great Britain—are people badly, uncomfortably, painfully shod, in 27old boots, rotten boots, sham boots; and on the other great stretches of land in the world, with unlimited possibilities of cattle and leather and great numbers of people, who, either through wealth or trade disorder, are doing no work. ”

“ They propose that the State should take away the land, and the railways, and shipping, and many great organised enterprises from their owners, who use them simply to squeeze the means for a wasteful private expenditure out of the common mass of men, and should administer all these things, generously and boldly, not for profit, but for service. ”

“ It is passion, it is enthusiasm, and indignation that mould the world to their will—and I cannot see how any one can go into the back streets of London, or any large British town, and not be filled up with 46shame, and passionate resolve to end so grubby and mean a state of affairs as is displayed there.
I don’t think the “human nature” argument against the possibility of Socialism will hold water. ”

“ Everybody does not suffer misery from boots.
One person I know, another friend of mine, who can testify to that; who has tasted all the miseries of boots, and who now goes about the world free of them, but not altogether forgetful of them. A stroke of luck, aided perhaps by a certain alacrity on his own part, lifted him 18out of the class in which one buys one’s boots and clothes out of what is left over from a pound a week, into the class in which one spends seventy or eighty pounds a year on clothing. Sometimes he buys shoes and boots at very good shops; sometimes he has them made for him ”

“ Now do not think I am dwelling unduly upon my second friend’s good fortune, when I tell you that once he was constantly getting pain and miserable 21states of mind, colds for example, from the badness of his clothing, shame from being shabby, pain from the neglected state of his teeth, from the indigestion of unsuitable food eaten at unsuitable hours, from the insanitary ugly house in which he lived and the bad air of that part of London, from things indeed quite beyond the unaided power of a poor over-worked man to remedy. ”

“ He no longer curses fate, but the dulness of statesmen and powerful responsible people who have neither the heart, nor courage, nor capacity, to change the state of mismanagement that gives us these things. ”

“ You may say that to take away property from people is unjust and robbery; but is that really so? Suppose you found a number of children in a nursery all very dull and unhappy because one of them, who had been badly spoilt, had got all the toys together and claimed them all, and refused to let the others have any. Would you not dispossess the child, however honest its illusion that it was right to be greedy? That is practically the position 40of the property-owner to-day. ”

“ The world will be vastly different, with a different sort of houses, different sorts of people. All the different trades and industries will be changed, the medical profession will be carried on under different conditions, engineering, 49science, the theatrical trade, the clerical trade, schools, hotels, almost every trade, will have to undergo as complete an internal change as a caterpillar does when it becomes a moth. ”

“ It is almost always painful to me to walk behind girls who work out, and go to and fro, consuming much foot-wear, for this very reason, that their heels seem always to wear askew. Girls ought always to be so beautiful, most girls could be so beautiful, that to see their poor feet askew, the grace of their walk gone, a sort of spinal curvature induced, makes me wretched, and angry 13with a world that treats them so. ”

“ You find at once you are interrupted. Along comes your first obstacle in the shape of a man who tells you the cattle and the leather belong to him. You explain that 28the leather is wanted for people who have no decent boots in England. He says he does not care a rap what you want it for; before you may take it from him you have to buy him off; it is his private property, this leather, and the herd and the land over which the herd ranges. You ask him how much he wants for his leather ”