Page:Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.djvu/350

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists would be employed in creating pleasure, culture, and education. All these people, like the other branches of the public service, would be paid with paper money, and with it all of them would be able to purchase abundance of all those things which constitute civilisation.

'Meanwhile, as a result of all this, the private employers and capitalists, finding that no one would come and work for them to be driven and bullied and sweated for a miserable trifle of metal money, will protest against what they call the unfair competition of State industry, and some of them may threaten to leave the country and take their capital with them. As most of these persons are too lazy to work, and as we shall not need their money, we shall be very glad to see them go. But with regard to their real capital, their factories, farms, mines or machinery, that will be a different matter. To allow these things to remain idle and unproductive, would constitute an injury to the community. So a law will be passed, declaring that all land not cultivated by the owner, or any factory shut down for more than a specified time, will be taken possession of by the State and worked for the benefit of the community. Fair compensation will be paid in paper money to the former owners, who will be granted an income or pension of so much a year either for life or for a stated period according to circumstances and the ages of the persons concerned.

'As for the private traders, the wholesale and retail dealers in the things produced by labour, they will be forced by the State competition to close down their shops and warehouses, first, because they will not be able to replenish their stocks, and secondly because even if they were able to do so they would not be able to sell them. This will throw out of work a great host of people who are at present engaged in useless occupations, such as the managers and assistants in the shops of which there are now half-a-dozen of the same sort in a single street, and the thousands of men and women who are slaving away their lives producing advertisements. These people are in most cases working for such a miserable pittance of metal money that they are unable to procure sufficient of the necessaries of life to secure them from starvation.

'The masons, carpenters, painters, glaziers and all the others engaged in maintaining these unnecessary stores and shops will all be thrown out of employment, but all those 338